Graphixia

fun_home_peter_01

admin — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 05:05:47 +0000

superman_cover_01

admin — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 21:27:57 +0000

wonder_woman_cover_01

admin — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 21:28:25 +0000

superman_cover_01

admin — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 21:28:27 +0000

watchmen_i_01

admin — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 21:28:28 +0000

watchmen_xii_23

admin — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 21:28:29 +0000

Fun Home - Bruce Bechdel

wilkinsp — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 05:34:23 +0000

ghost world_33

wilkinsp — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 05:35:20 +0000

Bunny Duck

admin — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 06:29:25 +0000

batman_bruce_begins_01

admin — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 10:10:18 +0000

batman_bruce_begins_02

admin — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 10:10:37 +0000

jimmy_corrigan_begins_01

admin — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 10:11:13 +0000

jimmy_corrigan_begins_02

admin — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 10:11:16 +0000

two_face_begins

admin — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 10:11:20 +0000

bruce_bechdel_begins_01

admin — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 10:20:00 +0000

bruce_bechdel_begins_02

admin — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 10:20:06 +0000

bruce_bechdel_begins_03

admin — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 10:20:07 +0000

sherlock_holmes_09

admin — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 07:58:28 +0000

eisner_contract_preface

admin — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 07:59:10 +0000

maus_spiegelman_bodies

admin — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 07:59:30 +0000

ghost world_79-crop

wilkinsp — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 21:27:02 +0000

ghost world_79-crop

wilkinsp — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 21:27:33 +0000

Fun Home dream

wilkinsp — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 21:32:09 +0000

Jimmy Corrigan 06_32

admin — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 23:53:13 +0000

AP026-crop

wilkinsp — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:35:38 +0000

AP 112-crop

wilkinsp — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:40:22 +0000

Maus_1_010

admin — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 07:36:52 +0000

Maus_1_011

admin — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 07:36:59 +0000

Maus_1_021

admin — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 07:37:05 +0000

Maus_1_067

admin — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 07:37:12 +0000

Maus_1_075

admin — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 07:37:18 +0000

Maus_shiek

admin — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 07:52:46 +0000

Maus_1_076

admin — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 08:09:29 +0000

Maus_chrono

admin — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 08:11:15 +0000

AP 112-crop

wilkinsp — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 23:21:03 +0000

AP 190-crop

wilkinsp — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 23:22:31 +0000

AP 165

wilkinsp — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 23:25:02 +0000

AP 165

wilkinsp — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 23:27:28 +0000

AP 165

wilkinsp — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 23:29:31 +0000

riel_02_brackets

admin — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 06:55:09 +0000

riel_03_brackets

admin — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 06:55:16 +0000

riel_04_dialect

admin — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 06:55:23 +0000

riel-05_death

admin — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 06:55:28 +0000

louis_riel_113

admin — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 06:45:35 +0000

louis_riel_192

admin — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 06:45:37 +0000

louis_riel_113

wilkinsp — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 03:21:51 +0000

louis_riel_113

wilkinsp — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 03:24:41 +0000

louis_riel_192

wilkinsp — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 03:28:39 +0000

louis_riel_epilogue

admin — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 04:14:37 +0000

ASM001_07

admin — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 05:30:03 +0000

ASM001_08

admin — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 05:30:17 +0000

Air Conditioning Ad from Spiderman #1

admin — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 05:30:40 +0000

Body Builder Ad in Spiderman #1

admin — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 05:31:47 +0000

Saturday Morning Shoe Salesman Spiderman #1

admin — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 05:31:54 +0000

ASM012_11-crop

wilkinsp — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 18:44:53 +0000

ASM008_22-crop

wilkinsp — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 18:52:53 +0000

ASM008_22-crop

wilkinsp — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 18:54:50 +0000

ASM010_08-crop

wilkinsp — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 19:02:55 +0000

spacebetween0

Grayb — Fri, 06 May 2011 05:15:21 +0000

spacebetween1

Grayb — Fri, 06 May 2011 05:16:12 +0000

spacebetween2

Grayb — Fri, 06 May 2011 05:17:00 +0000

spacebetween3

Grayb — Fri, 06 May 2011 05:18:18 +0000

spacebetween4

Grayb — Fri, 06 May 2011 05:19:04 +0000

spacebetween5

Grayb — Fri, 06 May 2011 05:19:46 +0000

spacebetween6

Grayb — Fri, 06 May 2011 05:20:37 +0000

spiderman_02_01

admin — Sat, 14 May 2011 05:57:36 +0000

spiderman_02_02

admin — Sat, 14 May 2011 05:57:38 +0000

spiderman_02_03

admin — Sat, 14 May 2011 05:57:39 +0000

spiderman_02_04

admin — Sat, 14 May 2011 05:57:43 +0000

spiderman_02_05

admin — Sat, 14 May 2011 05:57:48 +0000

spiderman_02_05A

admin — Sat, 14 May 2011 05:57:52 +0000

Spiderman_02_06

admin — Sat, 14 May 2011 05:58:00 +0000

spiderman_02_07

admin — Sat, 14 May 2011 05:58:41 +0000

ASM007 - Page 30-crop

wilkinsp — Tue, 24 May 2011 03:42:40 +0000

ASM008 - Page 4-crop

wilkinsp — Tue, 24 May 2011 03:43:59 +0000

photo (1)-crop

wilkinsp — Tue, 24 May 2011 03:45:20 +0000

Batman 001

wilkinsp — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:36:03 +0000

Batman 002

wilkinsp — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:38:47 +0000

Batman 003

wilkinsp — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:39:32 +0000

Batman 004

wilkinsp — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:40:55 +0000

Trains and Planes

wilkinsp — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 04:10:02 +0000

Why

wilkinsp — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 04:13:06 +0000

Holly

wilkinsp — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 04:14:26 +0000

Baby Exchange

wilkinsp — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 04:16:26 +0000

A Father is Never Free

wilkinsp — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 04:17:27 +0000

Trains and Planes

wilkinsp — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 04:24:42 +0000

Why

wilkinsp — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 04:26:20 +0000

Gotham By Gaslight

wilkinsp — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 23:40:08 +0000

Elseworlds

wilkinsp — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 23:40:54 +0000

Holy Terror

wilkinsp — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 23:43:08 +0000

WonderWoman

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:57:02 +0000

Catwoman

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:57:04 +0000

elektra

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:57:07 +0000

Emma-Frost

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:57:10 +0000

Jean Grey (Phoenix X-Men)

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:57:12 +0000

jp-wonder-2-popup

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:57:14 +0000

jp-wonder-2-popup

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:57:14 +0000

newwwcostumewonderwoman

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:57:15 +0000

newwwcostumewonderwoman

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:57:15 +0000

Phoenix - Jean Grey - X-men

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:57:16 +0000

Phoenix - Jean Grey - X-men

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:57:16 +0000

Power Girl

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:57:16 +0000

Power Girl

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:57:16 +0000

Rogue (X-Men)

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:57:17 +0000

Rogue (X-Men)

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:57:17 +0000

Rogue_2

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:57:18 +0000

Rogue_2

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:57:18 +0000

Storm

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:57:20 +0000

Storm

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:57:20 +0000

Sue Storm (Invisible Woman (1950s))

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:57:21 +0000

Sue Storm (Invisible Woman (1950s))

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:57:21 +0000

Sue Storm (Invisible Woman)

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:57:22 +0000

Sue Storm (Invisible Woman)

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:57:22 +0000

drift1-700x442

admin — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:47:27 +0000

drift1-700x442

wilkinsp — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:47:27 +0000

DriftingLife

admin — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:59:20 +0000

DriftingLife

wilkinsp — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:59:20 +0000

041509_adriftinglife04

admin — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:59:54 +0000

041509_adriftinglife04

wilkinsp — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:59:54 +0000

Photo on 2011-08-01 at 23.04 #2

admin — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 06:06:31 +0000

Photo on 2011-08-01 at 23.04 #2

Grayb — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 06:06:31 +0000

mom_drawing

admin — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 21:38:32 +0000

mom_drawing

Grayb — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 21:38:32 +0000

GL1

admin — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:21:08 +0000

GL1

smarsden — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:21:08 +0000

GLAlan

admin — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:23:19 +0000

GLAlan

smarsden — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:23:19 +0000

show22

admin — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:26:08 +0000

show22

smarsden — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:26:08 +0000

show22

admin — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:27:12 +0000

show22

smarsden — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:27:12 +0000

GL076

smarsden — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:28:01 +0000

GL076

admin — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:28:01 +0000

GLCorps

smarsden — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:29:05 +0000

GLCorps

admin — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:29:05 +0000

GLCorps

admin — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:31:36 +0000

GLCorps

smarsden — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:31:36 +0000

Criminal_Last_of_the_Innocent_Vol_1_1

admin — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 22:05:43 +0000

CRIM_TEASER1-crop

wilkinsp — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 22:07:25 +0000

CRIM_TEASER1-crop

admin — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 22:07:25 +0000

a100ad1c-df30-47e8-9a53-991b37759a57_412x232

Grayb — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 18:52:40 +0000

Marilyn Monroe Reads Ulysses

admin — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:42:53 +0000

Marilyn Monroe Reads Ulysses

admin — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:42:53 +0000

Bluesbreakers_John_Mayall_with_Eric_Clapton

admin — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:42:54 +0000

Bluesbreakers_John_Mayall_with_Eric_Clapton

admin — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:42:54 +0000

Cheapthrills

admin — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:42:56 +0000

Cheapthrills

admin — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:42:56 +0000

Elvis reads a comic book

admin — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:42:57 +0000

Elvis reads a comic book

admin — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:42:57 +0000

Marylin Monroe Reads Ulysses_2

admin — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:42:58 +0000

Marylin Monroe Reads Ulysses_2

admin — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:42:58 +0000

Cat in ther Hat

admin — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:43:55 +0000

Cat in ther Hat

admin — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:43:55 +0000

Jez Alborough - SuperDuck

admin — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:47:43 +0000

Jez Alborough - SuperDuck

admin — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:47:43 +0000

Dick and Jane

admin — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:48:07 +0000

Dick and Jane

admin — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:48:07 +0000

comic_book_guy

admin — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:55:40 +0000

comic_book_guy

admin — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:55:40 +0000

09-Daytripper

wilkinsp — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:20:40 +0000

09-Daytripper

admin — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:20:40 +0000

Daytripper 4 cover

wilkinsp — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:21:31 +0000

Daytripper 4 cover

admin — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:21:31 +0000

tumblr_lhdoi9bROg1qb5j1co1_500_thumb

wilkinsp — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:22:21 +0000

tumblr_lhdoi9bROg1qb5j1co1_500_thumb

admin — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:22:21 +0000

tumblr_lhdoi9bROg1qb5j1co1_500_thumb

wilkinsp — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:25:21 +0000

tumblr_lhdoi9bROg1qb5j1co1_500_thumb

admin — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:25:21 +0000

ramona-flowers-scott-pilgrim-comic

admin — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 18:01:04 +0000

superman1

admin — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 18:20:15 +0000

superman1

admin — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 18:23:15 +0000

supebat1

admin — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 18:23:47 +0000

hulk1

admin — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 18:26:19 +0000

hulk1

admin — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 18:26:59 +0000

hulk1

admin — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 18:28:41 +0000

blake

admin — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:00:25 +0000

gross_donewrong

admin — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:00:36 +0000

ward_buildings

admin — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:00:49 +0000

ward_charity

admin — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:00:59 +0000

ramona-flowers-scott-pilgrim-comic

Grayb — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 18:01:04 +0000

EPSON scanner image

admin — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:01:16 +0000

EPSON scanner image

admin — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:01:29 +0000

ward_fountain

admin — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:01:41 +0000

ward_woodcut

admin — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:01:53 +0000

ward_woodcut

admin — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:02:07 +0000

maus

admin — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:08:54 +0000

action-comics-number-1

admin — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 03:28:12 +0000

Empire_State_pg26_detail

admin — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 03:31:10 +0000

Empire_State_Image5

admin — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 03:33:23 +0000

Empire_State_Image5

admin — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 03:36:33 +0000

EmpireState_Image4.1

admin — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 03:43:40 +0000

Empire_State_Image5

admin — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 03:49:06 +0000

tumblr_lgdv314twp1qbp6pmo1_500

admin — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 03:00:10 +0000

tumblr_lhpeezwYHp1qea22qo1_r2_500

admin — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 03:02:16 +0000

photo 1

admin — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 19:33:46 +0000

photo 2

admin — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 19:34:16 +0000

photo 3

admin — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 19:35:08 +0000

new52-1

admin — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:05:26 +0000

new52-2

admin — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:06:22 +0000

new52-2

admin — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:08:05 +0000

fp_teaser2-1024x703

admin — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:09:54 +0000

new52-6

admin — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:11:04 +0000

new52-4

admin — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:11:59 +0000

new52-4

admin — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:12:42 +0000

new52-6

admin — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:13:27 +0000

krazykat stamp

admin — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:12:16 +0000

krazykat stamp

admin — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:16:21 +0000

krazykat stamp

admin — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:17:41 +0000

1

admin — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 22:09:16 +0000

2

admin — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 22:09:18 +0000

3

admin — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 22:09:20 +0000

4

admin — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 22:09:21 +0000

5

admin — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 22:09:23 +0000

1

admin — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 22:10:34 +0000

2

admin — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 22:10:37 +0000

3

admin — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 22:10:40 +0000

4

admin — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 22:10:43 +0000

5

admin — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 22:10:47 +0000

photo 1

admin — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:43:48 +0000

photo 4

admin — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:49:14 +0000

photo 2

admin — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:52:45 +0000

Top

admin — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:19:09 +0000

Bottom

admin — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:19:54 +0000

Middle

admin — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:21:54 +0000

Pig nose

admin — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:36:06 +0000

boat2car

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 05:07:37 +0000

carshot

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 05:07:42 +0000

daplane

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 05:07:46 +0000

handyman

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 05:07:54 +0000

hereiam

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 05:07:57 +0000

hereiamgood

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 05:08:00 +0000

keyshot-end

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 05:08:07 +0000

phonograph

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 05:08:09 +0000

slipt-screen

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 05:08:27 +0000

sovietsecrets

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 05:08:36 +0000

sovietsecrets2

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 05:08:45 +0000

graphixia_logo

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 05:20:58 +0000

graphixia_header_1950s

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 05:21:57 +0000

graphixia_header

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 05:49:59 +0000

42_superman1

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 06:07:01 +0000

EPSON scanner image

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 06:11:06 +0000

44-peter

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 06:11:57 +0000

45-brenna

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 06:12:46 +0000

46-peter_conference

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 06:15:41 +0000

47-brenna_bookriot

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 06:16:40 +0000

48-scott_superman

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 06:17:51 +0000

49-krazykat-stamp

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 06:18:42 +0000

manifesto_thumbnail

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 06:20:59 +0000

pdw_test

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 06:21:45 +0000

51 - wilkins

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 06:30:33 +0000

52-carshot

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 07:06:43 +0000

photo-1

admin — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:32:18 +0000

tintin1

admin — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 23:45:19 +0000

Tintin3

admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:04:05 +0000

Tintin3

admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:05:21 +0000

Tintin3

admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:06:03 +0000

BlackIsland

admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:10:31 +0000

Tintin5

admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:23:55 +0000

Tintin4

admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:26:13 +0000

Tintin6

admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:28:36 +0000

tintin7

admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:31:51 +0000

Tintin4

admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:34:05 +0000

Tintin4

admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:36:14 +0000

Hey…Wait..

admin — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:30:04 +0000

Batman

admin — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:31:47 +0000

Drive

admin — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:33:40 +0000

Death

admin — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:35:23 +0000

Black

admin — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:37:04 +0000

White

admin — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:38:52 +0000

250px-Supermanredson

admin — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 04:48:11 +0000

redsonwatching

admin — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 06:27:54 +0000

ASM007_03

admin — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 05:42:44 +0000

ASM001_03_snippet

admin — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 05:45:47 +0000

superman_memory

admin — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 06:03:00 +0000

superman_memory_key

admin — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 06:03:38 +0000

punishermax1

admin — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:54:43 +0000

punishermax1

admin — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:55:24 +0000

punishermax1

admin — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:57:05 +0000

punisherkingpin

admin — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:58:41 +0000

punisherkingpin

admin — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 18:00:05 +0000

bullseyefamily

admin — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 18:01:07 +0000

punishermemory

admin — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 18:02:12 +0000

bullseyereveal

admin — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 18:03:10 +0000

punisherkingpin

admin — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 18:19:56 +0000

punisherkingpin

admin — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 18:21:33 +0000

Cerebus

admin — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 01:58:08 +0000

Cerebus 139

admin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 04:41:30 +0000

Cerebus 140

admin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 04:41:37 +0000

Cerebus 141

admin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 04:41:42 +0000

Cerebus 142

admin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 04:41:52 +0000

Cerebus 143

admin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 04:42:09 +0000

Cerebus 144

admin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 04:42:14 +0000

Cerebus 145

admin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 04:42:19 +0000

Cerebus 146

admin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 04:42:26 +0000

Cerebus 147

admin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 04:42:33 +0000

Cerebus_148

admin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 04:42:43 +0000

Cerebus_150

admin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 04:43:08 +0000

Cerebus_149_14-15

admin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 05:11:21 +0000

Cerebus_featured

admin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 06:27:59 +0000

melmoth-1

admin — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 04:06:12 +0000

Cerebus_149

admin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 04:42:56 +0000

melmoth-1

admin — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 04:19:43 +0000

melmoth-1

admin — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 04:20:18 +0000

51ZQMHJ52YL._SL500_AA300_

admin — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 04:37:02 +0000

51ZQMHJ52YL._SL500_AA300_

admin — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 04:42:20 +0000

51ZQMHJ52YL

admin — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:07:45 +0000

51ZQMHJ52YL

admin — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:08:30 +0000

51ZQMHJ52YL

admin — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:10:10 +0000

melmoth-12

admin — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:19:12 +0000

CerebusSketch

admin — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 21:26:50 +0000

CerebusSketch

admin — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 21:28:01 +0000

CerebusMinds

admin — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 21:30:14 +0000

CerebusJaka

admin — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 21:31:37 +0000

CerebusScalpel

admin — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 21:32:13 +0000

cerebus1

admin — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 22:14:12 +0000

Screen Shot 2012-04-02 at 7.49.53 PM

admin — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 02:59:27 +0000

Screen Shot 2012-04-02 at 7.49.53 PM

admin — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 02:59:35 +0000

Screen Shot 2012-04-02 at 7.53.52 PM

admin — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 03:04:05 +0000

Screen Shot 2012-04-02 at 7.56.19 PM

admin — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 03:07:50 +0000

runaways586

admin — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 21:52:26 +0000

10008L

admin — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 22:01:55 +0000

runaways_comic_book_cover_01

admin — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 22:03:36 +0000

featured

admin — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 04:40:35 +0000

maus-cover1

admin — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 04:41:23 +0000

maus-cover1

admin — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 04:42:30 +0000

maus-cover1

admin — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 04:44:34 +0000

rorschach

admin — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 04:44:57 +0000

superman_origins

admin — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 04:45:23 +0000

maus_bodies

admin — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 04:45:49 +0000

Jimmy Corrigan 01_11

admin — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 04:46:16 +0000

walkingdeadv13

admin — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:16:18 +0000

walkingdeadv13

admin — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:19:09 +0000

cover

admin — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:19:52 +0000

lorishot

admin — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:21:55 +0000

pregnant

admin — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:22:42 +0000

reunion

admin — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:23:44 +0000

carlhug

admin — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:24:46 +0000

carlshoots

admin — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:25:33 +0000

nothing

admin — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:31:39 +0000

hope

admin — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:34:33 +0000

20120430-204851.jpg

admin — Tue, 01 May 2012 02:48:53 +0000

20120430-204930.jpg

admin — Tue, 01 May 2012 02:49:32 +0000

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Farm School 003

admin — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 03:14:24 +0000

graphixia_130_keyimage

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lost-at-sea-2

admin — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 05:10:28 +0000

tumblr_m9comq46or1qzqao6o1_500

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110535-612x612-1.png

admin — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 05:49:24 +0000

Escape_Cover.indd

admin — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 02:44:28 +0000

gamsaan01

admin — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 02:45:53 +0000

gamsaan02

admin — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 02:46:36 +0000

gamsaan03

admin — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 02:48:30 +0000

gold

admin — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 02:49:44 +0000

ice_haven_01

admin — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 05:33:40 +0000

icehaven_key

admin — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 05:35:55 +0000

Screen Shot 2013-09-17 at 20.45.48

admin — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 20:50:19 +0000

The Islanders Cover

admin — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 20:50:24 +0000

Screen Shot 2013-09-17 at 20.45.48

admin — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 22:09:31 +0000

Hands The Islanders

admin — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 22:09:46 +0000

On stage the islanders

admin — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 22:15:19 +0000

TEOTFW.woods

admin — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 22:22:01 +0000

DSCF1082

admin — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 22:22:21 +0000

DSCF1085

admin — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 22:22:34 +0000

TEOTFWa

admin — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 22:22:37 +0000

TEOTFWa

admin — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 22:29:11 +0000

TEOTFW.woods

admin — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 22:30:34 +0000

Homestuck_and_why_it_wouldn_t_work_as_a_paper_comic (1)

admin — Thu, 03 Oct 2013 03:22:08 +0000

Hate 001

admin — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 03:59:53 +0000

Hate 004

admin — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 04:02:00 +0000

Hate 002

admin — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 04:04:15 +0000

Hate 003

admin — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 04:06:05 +0000

action-comics-first-issue-1938

admin — Thu, 24 Oct 2013 21:58:53 +0000

new-52-allheroes

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The_New_52_supes

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DNW-key

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3to1es

admin — Tue, 29 Oct 2013 15:17:39 +0000

1537682

admin — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 10:02:49 +0000

superman_comics1987

admin — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 10:03:51 +0000

Batman_427

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x-men1

admin — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 10:05:22 +0000

Batman608RRPCover

admin — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 10:06:00 +0000

Walking-Dead-10-Years

admin — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 10:06:44 +0000

x-men1

admin — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 10:13:35 +0000

fake_star_wars_1_price_variant_close-up

admin — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 10:17:06 +0000

whitman

admin — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 10:21:06 +0000

3d

admin — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 10:26:59 +0000

Calvin and Hobbes Hate

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ch1-1

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photo 1.PNG

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photo 2.PNG

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photo 3.PNG

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photo 4.PNG

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photo 1.PNG

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Screen Shot 2013-11-26 at 14.51.21

admin — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 14:51:54 +0000

jnf3

admin — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 14:55:30 +0000

ernesto

admin — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 07:51:06 +0000

JB1

admin — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 17:53:53 +0000

endoftheworld_lg

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Swarte

admin — Wed, 11 Dec 2013 04:24:36 +0000

Ben Woo Campbell Tweet

admin — Wed, 11 Dec 2013 04:24:38 +0000

Swarte

admin — Wed, 11 Dec 2013 04:26:38 +0000

Ben Woo Campbell Tweet

admin — Wed, 11 Dec 2013 04:28:59 +0000

graphixia_146-5

admin — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 06:06:38 +0000

graphixia_146-6

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grpahixia_146-3

admin — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 06:06:52 +0000

grpahixia_146-7

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graphixia_146-key

admin — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 06:16:10 +0000

Letter-44-2-Cover

admin — Mon, 23 Dec 2013 07:02:38 +0000

250px-Mind_MGMT_cover_1

admin — Mon, 23 Dec 2013 07:05:35 +0000

3434626-saltire1_outer_cover_05+front+only

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untitled-1-1362640621-1

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tumblr_mxxf51NNN11qj2fojo1_1280

admin — Mon, 23 Dec 2013 07:11:39 +0000

portrait_incredible

admin — Mon, 23 Dec 2013 07:12:52 +0000

original

admin — Mon, 23 Dec 2013 07:14:41 +0000

9781606995570_vert-73cf8de7436ae413621ca11b93e70efdd568f206-s6-c30

admin — Mon, 23 Dec 2013 07:15:43 +0000

Hawkeye-011-000-e1372785848612

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we321213

admin — Mon, 23 Dec 2013 22:48:49 +0000

GMTWGforWired4

admin — Mon, 23 Dec 2013 23:14:00 +0000

151 - Key

admin — Thu, 09 Jan 2014 19:26:13 +0000

151 - key 2

admin — Thu, 09 Jan 2014 19:27:53 +0000

sanddark

admin — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 05:15:56 +0000

sandlight

admin — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 05:16:05 +0000

gaiman

admin — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 05:23:26 +0000

Nelson Baczynski

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Nelson Pleece

admin — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 15:52:39 +0000

dump

admin — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 21:47:40 +0000

out a window

admin — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 21:56:18 +0000

Dump 2 cover colour

admin — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 22:07:15 +0000

vote both

admin — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 22:26:48 +0000

Vote last 3 panels both

admin — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 22:45:22 +0000

This diagram describes the convoluted process of multi-authored mainstream American comic books. It imposed constraints of all types, and forced those involved in the creation of comic books to work within those limits. Diagram CC-BY Ernesto Priego

admin — Tue, 04 Feb 2014 15:10:49 +0000

This diagram describes the convoluted process of multi-authored mainstream American comic books. It imposed constraints of all types, and forced those involved in the creation of comic books to work within those limits. Diagram CC-BY Ernesto Priego

This diagram describes the convoluted process of multi-authored mainstream American comic books. It imposed constraints of all types, and forced those involved in the creation of comic books to work within those limits. Diagram CC-BY Ernesto Priego

admin — Tue, 04 Feb 2014 15:11:29 +0000

The Max Fleischer Studios in 1935, where Jack Kirby started his career (Evanier 2008)

admin — Tue, 04 Feb 2014 15:21:41 +0000

The Max Fleischer Studios in 1935, where Jack Kirby started his career (Evanier 2008).

Image1

admin — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 23:10:57 +0000

Image2

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Image3

admin — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 23:15:23 +0000

Mind-MGMT-12-Cover1

admin — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 04:46:00 +0000

mind-mgmt-opening-sequence

admin — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 04:47:09 +0000

Tintin_and_the_Picaros_Egmont

admin — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 04:48:39 +0000

action_comics_89_

admin — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 05:34:42 +0000

action_comics_89_key

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maus_gate

admin — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 05:34:48 +0000

will_eisner

admin — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 05:34:49 +0000

afterlife-1_cv_no-logo

admin — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 03:49:18 +0000

photo 2

admin — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 04:14:51 +0000

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alwarchie5

admin — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 04:51:31 +0000

New_York_World's_Fair_1

admin — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 06:23:33 +0000

blond_superman

admin — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 06:24:45 +0000

McCloud2

admin — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 06:25:34 +0000

McCloud1

admin — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 06:26:18 +0000

McCloud2

admin — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 06:27:17 +0000

civil-war-1-turner-sketch

admin — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 06:28:37 +0000

civil_war_1

admin — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 06:28:42 +0000

civil_war_1

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civil-war-1-turner-sketch

admin — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 06:34:44 +0000

civil-war-1-turner

admin — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 06:50:45 +0000

civilwar1turner1in25lrghd6

admin — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 06:52:47 +0000

blond_superman

admin — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 07:06:06 +0000

Passionrougeman

admin — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 21:29:50 +0000

Passionrougeman

admin — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 21:33:26 +0000

Screenshot 2014-03-18 21.41.38

admin — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 21:41:52 +0000

Ex Libris by Fred Jourdain

admin — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 21:49:57 +0000

admin — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 21:54:53 +0000

HulkComic01

admin — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 12:38:51 +0000

comics-bash-street-sign-01

admin — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 12:41:16 +0000

Night-Raven-ad-660

admin — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 12:45:45 +0000

Hugo_Tate_Advance.pdf

admin — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 12:50:53 +0000

ww1001

admin — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 12:52:10 +0000

EC 9

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ww2

admin — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 13:13:31 +0000

Opper’s "A Real English Outfit in America" 1893

admin — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 13:52:31 +0000

Opper’s "A Real English Outfit in America" 1893. Courtesy of the Early Comics Archive.

The World, Sunday February 16 1896- The Yellow Kid appears

admin — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 14:14:53 +0000

Richard F. Outcault, "The Great Dog Show in M'Googan Avenue". The New York World, Sunday February 16 1896. Courtesy of the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library.

The cover of the 36-page Famous Funnies. A Carnival of Comics (1933), sold through Woolworth's. The cover was cardboard and a price tag of 10 American cents had been stuck to it. (Lupoff and Thompson, 1970).

admin — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 14:17:58 +0000

The cover of the 36-page Famous Funnies. A Carnival of Comics (1933), sold through Woolworth's. The cover was cardboard and a price tag of 10 American cents had been stuck to it. (Lupoff and Thompson, 1970).

Bechdel i-vi,1-234F

admin — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 01:27:11 +0000

octopus-pie-525x339

admin — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 01:27:16 +0000

SPV1-HC-PG-010-FNL

admin — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 01:27:25 +0000

Kirby Eternals

admin — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 23:01:05 +0000

Kirby Mister Miracle

admin — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 23:01:17 +0000

Kirby Silver Star

admin — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 23:01:28 +0000

Kirby Thor

admin — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 23:01:35 +0000

Nocenti Adams Longshot

admin — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 23:01:47 +0000

2014-04-23 20.57.25

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2014-04-23 20.57.55

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2014-04-23 20.59.02

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2014-04-23 21.00.29

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2014-04-23 21.01.56

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2014-04-23 21.05.28

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2014-04-23 21.08.58

admin — Fri, 25 Apr 2014 16:48:35 +0000

photo (1)

admin — Fri, 25 Apr 2014 16:48:52 +0000

165-mixed-tape

admin — Tue, 06 May 2014 04:08:33 +0000

understanding-comics1

admin — Tue, 13 May 2014 16:19:10 +0000

clip

admin — Tue, 13 May 2014 16:56:28 +0000

P1070188

admin — Tue, 20 May 2014 05:08:01 +0000

P1070188

admin — Tue, 20 May 2014 05:29:30 +0000

P1070228

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P1070196

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P1070193

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P1070207

admin — Tue, 20 May 2014 05:40:44 +0000

Pascal Blanchet - White Rapids

admin — Tue, 27 May 2014 23:46:52 +0000

Michel Rabagliati - Paul Joins the Scouts

admin — Tue, 27 May 2014 23:49:44 +0000

MRPS

admin — Tue, 27 May 2014 23:50:43 +0000

ESHD

admin — Tue, 27 May 2014 23:55:00 +0000

LnR 18

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HT fi

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LnR 33

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LnR 18

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castree

admin — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 19:32:34 +0000

woelv02

admin — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 19:33:00 +0000

HT AH1

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HT AH2

admin — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 19:35:14 +0000

HT mix

admin — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 19:42:22 +0000

crumb collecting

admin — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 16:13:17 +0000

An autobiographical page by Robert Crumb about record collecting.

"Stories about record collecting and working-" Robert Crumb (art) and Harvey Pekar (writing), cover for American Splendor No. 4. (1979).

admin — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 16:15:17 +0000

"Stories about record collecting and working:" Robert Crumb (art) and Harvey Pekar (writing), cover for American Splendor No. 4. (1979).

One of Robert Crumb's most famous comics is actually not a comic book, but the cover artwork for a rock and roll LP album (1968).

admin — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 16:16:30 +0000

One of Robert Crumb's most famous comics is actually not a comic book, but the cover artwork for a rock and roll LP album (1968).

ZapComix_0_3-0

admin — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 16:34:03 +0000

A copy of Zap Comix 0, 1967, graded in "Good" condition. Via CGC Comics.

The first issue of Mad magazine; artwork by Harvey Kurtzman, (October 1952).

admin — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 17:28:43 +0000

The cover of the first issue of Mad magazine; artwork by Harvey Kurtzman, (October 1952).

weezer

admin — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 00:28:00 +0000

fig1

admin — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 23:36:37 +0000

fig2

admin — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 23:36:41 +0000

fig3

admin — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 23:36:49 +0000

fig4

admin — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 23:36:52 +0000

My mom died last year

admin — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 04:21:10 +0000

Spearfishin'

admin — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 04:21:14 +0000

thanks boys

admin — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 04:21:20 +0000

the game is like family

admin — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 04:21:24 +0000

trail_smoke_eaters_1995

admin — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 04:21:25 +0000

trail_smoke_eaters_1995

admin — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 04:21:26 +0000

you listening to me?

admin — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 04:21:29 +0000

wright_174_01

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wright_174_01A

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wright_174_01C

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wright_174_chickens

admin — Tue, 15 Jul 2014 23:53:27 +0000

wright_174_key

admin — Tue, 15 Jul 2014 23:53:29 +0000

wright_174_nostalgia

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wright_174_nostalgia2

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wright_174_pov-1

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wright_174_pov-1A

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wright_174_pov1A

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wright_174_pov1B

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wright_174_pov3

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wright_174_pov6

admin — Tue, 15 Jul 2014 23:54:42 +0000

JLU_Cv0-625x948

admin — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 14:26:32 +0000

jlu

admin — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 14:27:46 +0000

1377282131652

admin — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 14:29:44 +0000

essex-county-v1

admin — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 14:46:10 +0000

jeff-lemire

admin — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 15:17:56 +0000

2

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talesfarm_06

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2

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essex

admin — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 04:41:11 +0000

essex1

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essex_county-722666

admin — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 04:41:16 +0000

jeff-lemire

admin — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 04:41:19 +0000

page147_2

admin — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 04:41:21 +0000

Essex County 12

admin — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 19:22:12 +0000

176-sm-key

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pj-key

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thanks-boys

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wright_174_key

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171-pj-key

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175-bcg-key

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172-pw-key

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cooke

admin — Thu, 04 Sep 2014 19:39:46 +0000

crow p42

admin — Thu, 04 Sep 2014 19:41:42 +0000

Essex County 333

admin — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 19:30:56 +0000

Screenshot 2014-08-26 19.50.10

admin — Tue, 26 Aug 2014 18:50:24 +0000

Essex Cape

admin — Tue, 26 Aug 2014 18:54:59 +0000

sky

admin — Thu, 04 Sep 2014 19:44:21 +0000

inky line across the sky

OEast yarn p5 crop

admin — Thu, 04 Sep 2014 19:48:51 +0000

sturm-golem1

admin — Thu, 04 Sep 2014 19:58:34 +0000

essex feat

admin — Thu, 04 Sep 2014 20:11:34 +0000

IMG_0845

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IMG_0846

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IMG_0847

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IMG_0848

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IMG_0849

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IMG_0850

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IMG_0851

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IMG_0852

admin — Tue, 23 Sep 2014 18:53:41 +0000

doucet_02

admin — Tue, 30 Sep 2014 21:43:57 +0000

PA302111.jpg

admin — Tue, 30 Sep 2014 21:53:31 +0000

DIRECTINPUT~ This image has been directly inputted by the user. The photo desk has not viewed this image or cleared rights to the image. The image will be purged from Merlin in 14 days unless it is outputted for production or arrangements are made with the photo desk. Lynda barry

Tomboy_1

admin — Mon, 06 Oct 2014 20:37:08 +0000

http://lizprincepower.com/

20070609_comics

admin — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 05:19:31 +0000

bewarethevalkyries

admin — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 05:19:50 +0000

tumblr_n8w78jUEiN1r4tbkzo1_500

admin — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 05:20:05 +0000

#184 - Hattie 1

admin — Tue, 21 Oct 2014 18:51:50 +0000

The Wicked and The Divine, Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie

#184 - Hattie - 2

admin — Tue, 21 Oct 2014 18:52:49 +0000

Lumberjanes, Stevenson, Ellis and Allen

#184 - Hattie 3

admin — Tue, 21 Oct 2014 18:55:48 +0000

Lumberjanes, Stevenson, Ellis and Allen

#184 - Hattie 4

admin — Tue, 21 Oct 2014 18:56:30 +0000

Lumberjanes, Stevenson, Ellis and Allen

gastcs-1

admin — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 12:20:48 +0000

gastcs-2

admin — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 12:24:16 +0000

gastcs-4

admin — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 12:32:21 +0000

gastcs-3

admin — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 12:37:10 +0000

Briggs Ug

admin — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 12:42:01 +0000

gast featured

admin — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 12:52:18 +0000

gastcs-5

admin — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 13:13:50 +0000

she-hulk_girl-comics_cover

admin — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 18:32:14 +0000

vanistendael

admin — Tue, 18 Nov 2014 22:25:03 +0000

vanistendael

admin — Tue, 18 Nov 2014 22:27:28 +0000

vanistendael

admin — Tue, 18 Nov 2014 22:37:36 +0000

giraffe25

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giraffe25panel

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giraffe26

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giraffe34

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giraffe34panels

admin — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 10:35:01 +0000

giraffe101

admin — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 10:35:29 +0000

giraffe125

admin — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 10:35:41 +0000

giraffe125panels

admin — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 10:35:47 +0000

UnstableM

admin — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 10:36:10 +0000

giraffe featuredimage

admin — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 17:39:00 +0000

UnstableM s

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giraffe25 s

admin — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 07:24:44 +0000

giraffe34 s

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giraffe13

admin — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 08:07:35 +0000

189-keyimage

admin — Thu, 18 Dec 2014 19:57:17 +0000

gas-allstar-02

admin — Wed, 24 Dec 2014 13:27:11 +0000

all_star_superman__1_origins

admin — Wed, 24 Dec 2014 13:27:57 +0000

AllStarSupermanCv6

admin — Wed, 24 Dec 2014 13:31:53 +0000

AllStarSuperman-004

admin — Wed, 24 Dec 2014 13:33:46 +0000

2404518-fqallstarsuperman2

admin — Wed, 24 Dec 2014 13:35:46 +0000

41kUT+YgTKL

admin — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 15:43:12 +0000

LD_Front_Cover

admin — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 15:43:49 +0000

Screen Shot 2014-12-31 at 7.46.10 AM

admin — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 15:47:32 +0000

comics-unmasked-digital-anthology

admin — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 15:48:48 +0000

b99cc9e0871dac46_fpi_large

admin — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 15:52:43 +0000

MULTIV_Cv1_1_50_var-600x922

admin — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 15:54:03 +0000

morefun17

admin — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 15:57:32 +0000

V9cfN

admin — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 19:46:55 +0000

McGuire

admin — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 19:48:02 +0000

Sublime Manhwa

admin — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 04:47:38 +0000

Parasite

admin — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 04:49:48 +0000

Japanese Schoolgirls

admin — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 04:51:26 +0000

Damned Yankees

admin — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 04:53:44 +0000

Japland

admin — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 04:55:41 +0000

Box Brown

admin — Tue, 20 Jan 2015 05:24:49 +0000

graphixia_193_key

admin — Tue, 03 Feb 2015 19:04:14 +0000

Screen Shot 2015-02-10 at 3.57.35 PM

admin — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 21:01:25 +0000

Screen Shot 2015-02-10 at 4.02.48 PM

admin — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 21:03:23 +0000

Screen Shot 2015-02-10 at 3.53.58 PM

admin — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 21:04:13 +0000

Screen Shot 2015-02-10 at 4.20.32 PM

admin — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 21:31:45 +0000

ayacover

admin — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 07:47:25 +0000

aya1-500

admin — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 07:47:28 +0000

setting1

admin — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 07:47:35 +0000

Favela 1

admin — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 21:30:41 +0000

Andre Diniz - Picture a Favela

admin — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 21:30:46 +0000

Andre Diniz - Picture a Favela

admin — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 21:43:17 +0000

Screenshot 2015-02-24 21.42.54

admin — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 21:43:23 +0000

kari by Amruta Patil

admin — Wed, 04 Mar 2015 16:47:01 +0000

kari by Amruta Patil

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world comics network faq

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sharad sharma

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feat_world

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toormina1

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www.patgrantart.com

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www.patgrantart.com

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graphixia2016

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siqueiros

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David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974) . Section of The March of Humanity, 1965-71 Mural in the Polyforum Cultural Siquieros Mexico City

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David Alfaro Siqueiros. Man the Master, not the Slave of Technology. 1952. Detail. Pyroxylin on aluminum. Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico City

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FS_NE 1 covers

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FS_NE insides

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American Elf, January 13th 2000

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Kochalkaaa

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Judge Dredd Megazine. 1.11, August 1991. Cover by Dean Ormston

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Judge Dredd Megazine. 1.11, August 1991. Cover by Dean Ormston. Image file via http://comicbookdb.com/

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From Raptaur, 1991

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A selection of passages from Raptaur (Grant, Ormston and Frame, 1991).

Wicdiv

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Amaterasu

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baphomet

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Badb:Morrigan etc

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1970s

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I'm not a slut

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Meanwhile I was getting interested in boys

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So I was flattered

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el eternauta

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xmas

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ETERNAUT-fc

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Comics are for everyone

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backslashes

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100 maisons page

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Ruin Your Life

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Bitch Planet 7 first page

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Mikki Kendall Essay Title

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Another Series

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Ask Takagi

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Nizuma

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Rivals

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timthumb.php

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How to

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readthisway

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readers

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language

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gamblers

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editors

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aomori

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editorial-office

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Sample Page

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This is an example page. It's different from a blog post because it will stay in one place and will show up in your site navigation (in most themes). Most people start with an About page that introduces them to potential site visitors. It might say something like this:

Hi there! I'm a bike messenger by day, aspiring actor by night, and this is my blog. I live in Los Angeles, have a great dog named Jack, and I like piña coladas. (And gettin' caught in the rain.)

...or something like this:

The XYZ Doohickey Company was founded in 1971, and has been providing quality doohickies to the public ever since. Located in Gotham City, XYZ employs over 2,000 people and does all kinds of awesome things for the Gotham community.

As a new WordPress user, you should go to your dashboard to delete this page and create new pages for your content. Have fun!

#1 Fun Home and Secret Identity

admin — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 21:55:46 +0000

The superhero's identity, the way that it condenses a repressed identity in costume and metonymy while producing an identity split in the charater who becomes the hero, has a surprising affinity with identity themes in "serious" graphic narratives. In Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Jimmy's Superman pyjamas overtly play off of the superhero motif. Through a visual inversion, the doughy, infantile Jimmy is the diametrical opposite of Superman; yet the "S" on Jimmy's chest and the way Ware's drawings keep drawing our attention to it, insist that Jimmy's quest for his father has something to do with Superman. Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragic Comic, makes no sly iconic reference to superhero comics, but Bruce Bechdel, Alison's father, wrestles as much with the split in his identity as any costumed superhero. Fun Home presents Alison Bechdel's open lesbian identity as built upon the closeted homosexuality of her father who may have committed suicide because he was unable to handle the contradiction between his outward identity as heterosexual family man and his "inner" identity as a gay man. Like Bruce Wayne, Bruce Bechdel is something of a slave to the suit, the costume. David has argued that the key to Batman's (and perhaps all superheroes') "identity" is metonymy, the associations through costume, tools that allow Batman to show himself while also being masked or veiled. Batman must be simultaneously overtly on display and hidden. In Fun Home the same is true of Bruce Bechdel. Bruce Bechdel's veiled homosexuality is revealed and screened simultaneously by his house restoration which becomes a baroque fun house of mirrors. The house is a metonymy for his self-veiling but also for his desire to come out. This paradox is entirely along the lines of Bruce Wayne/ Batman's "here I am, masked" contradiction. An obsession with details stands for the characters' inner being as the signifiers of veiling and unveiling. This metonymy both says something about the character, gives clues to his or her secret identity, as it also acts as an alibi for, or distraction from, that identity. Alison serves as an interpreter of that identity, akin to the person obsessed with revealing the real human being beneath the costume. Part of the set-up of the superhero identity is the person who "almost knows" that the hero is such and such a person. In this role in Fun Home Alison searches for the confirming proof that Bruce was indeed gay. She reads all the signs (an obsession with flowers and appearance) and interprets the evidence (the fact that Bruce has been arrested for suspicious activity with a minor), but remains in doubt as to his truth: do his dalliances count as thorough going homosexuality?

#2 The Intepretive Paradox

admin — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 21:41:59 +0000

The interplay between costume, metonymy, and identity might best be described as a “paradox of identity.” The phrase tries to capture the fluidity that marks identity in graphic narratives. Most important in identifying the paradoxical nature of the character’s identity are the costume, the objects he comes in contact with, and often the emotional or physical crisis that leads the character into the paradoxical--or split--identity in the first place. When the reader comes in contact with the paradoxical representations of identity—often subversive and latent / secret and visible—s/he is forced into an ambiguous interpretive space where s/he cannot quite arrive at a stable understanding of the character’s “true” identity. With Superman, the reader’s paradoxical interpretation is most evident in Clark Kent. Clark is Superman’s secret identity. Unlike other costumed superheroes, Superman is the “real” person and Clark Kent is the costumed, disguised “hero.” The reader then sympathizes with Clark Kent--the Everyman hero--but longs to be the real person--morally upstanding, strong, attractive--that is Superman. Whereas a superhero such as Batman conceals his true identity—the everyday individual—and puts forward another identity to the world--The Batman--Superman conceals his otherworldliness by costuming himself as the mild-mannered, common man. The interplay between concealment and exposition in the superhero’s identity suggest that the text and image negotiate a subversive or latent space for interpretation as well. At times, the text spells out the action in the images. At other times, the text encourages the reader to interpret the images in a specific way, or context. The art and text participate in a kind of dance where each will conceal and display--at the same time, as opposing forces, or as collaboration. This interplay between text and image suggests that the text and image are participating in a similar negotiation between concealment and exposition as the reader is when interpreting the paradoxes of identity contained within the character. What emerges then is a nascent pattern inherent in both superhero and “serious” graphic narratives; that the structure or apparatus for story-telling inherently solicits paradoxical interpretations from the reader who cannot avoid consistent bouts of re-interpretation and going-back-over to stabilize the myriad structures of representation. The interpretive exercises the reader undertakes in reading a graphic narrative are paradoxical in nature because they rely on the reader’s fluid movement between concealment and exposition / text and image. The narrative structure then is a metonym for the paradoxical identity of the characters: Jimmy Corrigan is both Superman and Everyman, both drawn and imagined; Superman is both super and ordinary; Bruce Bechdel is both homosexual and heterosexual.

#3 Edifices and Artifices

admin — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 01:59:11 +0000

In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel goes to Greek mythology (via James Joyce's Ulysses) to find a model for her father. She compares Bruce to Dedalus, the "artificer" who constructed a labyrinth for King Minos and made wax wings so that his son, Icarus, might fly. Both of these stories are key to Bechdel's forensic unfolding of her father's life as they construct him as one who shows and conceals simlutaneously. In the myth of the labyrinth, Dedalus builds the labyrinth to trap the Minotaur, the half man/half bull monster who threatens Crete. For Fun Home, Bruce embodies both the master craftsman and the monster, for what he must conceal within the labyrinth are his sexual urges. And so, the labyrinth becomes a metaphor for the repressed. The Bechdel family's gothic revival house serves as a figure for this repression. Bruce is so obsessed with the details of his house and their perfect arrangement that it becomes clear that the house itself becomes a kind of "costume," that conceals and reveals, protects and exposes Bruce. The house is something that Bruce throws himself into as he pursues perfection: "He was an alchemist of appearance, a savant of surface, a Dedalus of decor (6). Appearance, surface, and decor all simultaneously fend off and invite an engagement with truth, depth, and substance. This paradox is what David is talking about when he writes about the problem of the superhero's mask and costume. In veiling himself, the superhero begs exposure, and every effort at concealment is also a clue that could possibly reveal. The same is true for Bruce Bechdel; the baroque details of his house seal up and provide a buffer for his gay identity--a woman visiting the house almost walks into a mirror because she is so disoriented by Bruce's designs--at the same time as they testify to it. The chandeliers, mirrors and gilt cornices become for Alison Bechdel the very signs of homosexuality. And not without some irony, as they enter the world of gay stereotypes: the lisp, the voice, the funny hand gestures. This treatment of the detail in both the superhero and the normal graphic narrative suggests an ambivalence about the substance of identity. It's possible that identity could just be decor, appearance, facade: A lure with nothing behind it. Rorschach in Watchmen actually demonstrates the desire for that to be true: his mask is not a mask but his "face." And Rorschach's mask is the most obscuring of masks, the antithesis of the mask that merely blacks out the area around the eyes. Rorschach is the costume and the costume is him. His alter-ego is a bit of nothing that he would just as soon obliterate. What Rorschach hides is not what your typical superhero conceals: shame. Bruce Bechdel in Fun Home conceals shame also behind a constantly shifting facade. Perhaps that is incorrect. Perhaps for Bruce there is an on/off identity switch: or a gay/straight switch. When he is in straight mode, everything is devoted to sealing up his homosexuality in baroque design. That the house is a "gothic revival" is apt because the gothic house is all about concealing a secret that the innocent wayfarer exposes. The whole purpose of Bruce's house is to "contain" the secret of his homosexuality. As Alison writes, "our house was not a real home at all but [rather] the simulacrum of one, a museum" (17).

#4 Epic and Mythological Losers

admin — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 10:01:41 +0000

Myth-making in the graphic narrative is a parallel structure of sorts. Identity itself is closely connected to an invented mythology: no matter how one conceptualizes it, the structures behind a character’s identity, and the stability of those structures, are reliant on the believability of the character’s mythology. That said, we can take this myth-making a step further when we consider that the narrative structure of the graphic narrative owes a good deal to the structures of epic poetry and its corresponding mythological characters. However, a central difference in the graphic narrative is that in most cases the epic structure is constructed to put forward the myth of the social misfit--or, loser--rather than the mythological model of chivalry and model citizenship. The secret identity that lies behind the mythological mask is most often that of a disaffected and dislocated individual who doesn’t fit in with social narratives common to traditional mythological heroes. Indeed, the central characters are often bad leaders and overtly individual; one has a difficult time extracting the "heroic" qualities of the epic character. Superheroes, and even central figures in normal graphic narratives, tend to represent disenfranchised groups or individuals. Central characters play out narratives about over-coming weakness, or admitting to it, isolation while at the same time assert the role of racial, sexual, and religious minorities in shaping our cultural narratives. Depending on how one reads Superman, he is either a displaced minority sent to earth so humanity can continue on without fear of criminal behaviour or a socially awkward freak who leans toward fetishizing his social superiority through costume and method acting. Jimmy Corrigan is likewise either a socially disconnected Mama’s boy searching for icons of a lost father, or a sympathetic anti-hero who stands in for all that is good and trusting about humanity. Spiderman is an alienated, socially awkward teenager, who, because he possesses an alternative genetic structure created by a rogue strain of DNA that he neither asked for or wants is literally "climbing the walls" trying to fit into—or fight against—inclusion in a social order. The trouble with these oppositional identities is that they create a vacuum into the reader falls. The character identities are always locked in this parallel structure wherein the mythological identity—the Batman—can never come in contact with the epic identity--the Bruce Wayne. The mythological identity is fixed--Batman, Superman, Bruce Bechdel the father, Jimmy Corrigan the Mama’s boy--but the epic identity--Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Bruce Bechdel Gay man, Jimmy Corrigan truth seeker--is always in development, always questing, always fighting, meeting each new adventure with skill and cunning, all the while inhabiting the world underneath the mask--or as Hollis Mason suggests “Under the Hood.” What graphic narratives play out is that what Peter calls "the substance of identity" is not located in the "décor, appearance, or façade," but it is managed from behind and the represented through the mythological mask--a mirrored metaphor for all that lies beneath. The result is that characters are always locked in a retarded structure—even though they learn, their stories are already told. There’s always another origin story to unravel, another quest to go on, and another crime to prevent. The reader is left to reconcile the mythological and epic, static and fluid, identities.

#5 The Image as Mask

admin — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 08:08:02 +0000

Comic book art has less to do with verisimilitude, perhaps, than caricature. The artist has a “way” of drawing a particular character that ensures consistency from frame to frame. This consistency establishes an iterability that collapses or reduces the “face” of a character to tics, lines, a limited number of expressions. With serialized comics, such as superhero comics, it is a shock when a different artist draws the series. It is both exciting and discombobulating. We see a new way of presenting the character, but also a disturbing deviation from the past. Things do not seem correct. We can look at the historical development of Batman, for instance, passing through the hands of various artists, growing stockier then more elongated, and feel a kind of disorientation. Alison Bechdel encodes this disorientation in Fun Home by presenting Bruce Bechdel in two visual modes: cartoon and simulated photograph. Like any comic artist, Bechdel has a “way” of drawing Bruce. Here is an example: This simple, iterable cartoon Bruce contrasts with Bruce in the “photograph”: As we can see, Bruce looks distinctly different in the “photograph” than he does in the generic frames of the text, replaying the identity duality in the text. Once we have seen the “photograph,” which is the first image that we see in the text, it is difficult to view the cartoon image as anything but a mask or screen. We say to ourselves, “that’s not him at all.” The cartoon picture is a mere place holder for the genuine image. While the cartoon image of Bruce is up front, all there, without shadow or darkness, the simulated photograph is haunting, immediately suggestive of darkness and secrecy. The shadow on the left side of his face gives him something of a “Two Face” quality, making the cartoon image appear to be missing a dimension. The image challenges us in a way that the cartoon never does. It is truly spooky A comparison of the simulated photograph and the actual photograph that Bechdel based her drawing on amplifies this spookiness. We can see a kinship between the drawing and the photograph right down to the shadow on the left side of the face. “That’s him,” we might be inclined to say. The simulated photograph plays verisimilitude against caricature to tease us with the possibility of getting at the “real” Bruce, when in fact all that we get is a chain of images. Curiously, the question of identity in the superhero comic is played out in the realm of caricature. Of course there is no “actual” Bruce Wayne or Peter Parker behind the image. But Fun Home uses the cartoon image as a way of addressing this absence in a memoir that addresses real events. In a way, there is no one behind Bechdel’s images, either, and that’s the tragic dimension of this “family tragicomic.” Behind the cartoon lies the simulated photograph, behind the simulated photograph lies the “real” photograph, but the chain stops there.

#6 Image Metaphors, Morals, and Primary Colours

admin — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 01:43:40 +0000

Unlike our earlier examples taken from Fun Home, Moore’s and Gibbons’ aesthetic approach in Watchmen presents a representation of character and setting that resists entrenchment in the standardized aesthetic tropes of traditional superhero comic books. The deep purples and pastel hues of Watchmen reflect an almost self-referential awareness of the aesthetic limits of the traditional medium. Whereas classic superhero comics tended to focus on highlighting the three primary colours, Moore and Gibbons push the palette to acutely signal their shift away from the aesthetics and story-telling principles of traditional superhero narratives. Moreover, Moore and Gibbons use colour in a way that signals different emotional elements than the reader expects from the comic book aesthetic. Where readers of traditional superhero comic books expect colour to signal rightness, nationalism, even a halo of holiness, readers of Watchmen are confronted with an aesthetic that suggests decay, rot, and obscured realities. Take for example yellow circles. A seemingly innocuous icon, the yellow circle appears throughout traditional superhero comic books in numerous forms. Indeed, once you start looking for them, they’re everywhere. Often adding richness to the white alternative, the yellow background usually appears in the form of a bright, solar orb. The most famous example appears in Action Comics #1; the first Superman episode.

Here, the yellow orb signals Superman’s power and, metaphorically, the hope that he offers to those oppressed by the criminal elements, or those persecuted by the over-arching power of others--it suggests his moral “rightness.” The next example comes from January 1942 Sensation Comics and features Wonder Woman charging forward against a yellow orb in background. As with Superman, Wonder Woman appears as a bastion of hope and redemption against an evil and corrupt world.

It is worth noting that in both cases, though more explicitly in Wonder Woman, the costumes the heroes wear fetishize the American Flag--the flag even appears to waving proudly to the right of Wonder Woman. The costumes and the yellow orb also tie-in well together, with the yellow accents of the costume reflecting the background, while the predominantly red and blue composition of the costume completes a circle of primary colours. In short, the superhero’s aesthetic is drawn from a primary palette which stands out against the often drab, grey, and muted colours of the background. This primary palette in turn suggests the strict lines of moral imperative for the characters--they do not wander from that which is right into shades of evil. However, Watchmen begins with a visual metaphor that asserts a move away from the traditional primary palette at the same time as the story itself signals a shift away from traditional superhero stories and clear moral paradigms. Watchmen begins with a close-up on a yellow orb, but in this instance the yellow orb appears as an ironic happy face icon covered in blood. As the image sequence continues, it gradually pulls away from the yellow happy face, red blood, and blue sewer incorporating ever more subtle pastel hues while leaving the traditional palette and story-line behind. The yellow orb becomes a fleshy, stubbled bald spot on the police detective’s head.

In Watchmen, superheroes tend to sink in, rather than standout from, yellow backgrounds. Characters such as Rorschach cohere more readily with the black background elements of the background just as Dr. Manhattan’s eerie soft blue is obscured by the pastel green background.

The aesthetic is meant to wash out the distinctions between good and evil, vice or virtue, and focus our attention on the difficulty of simple distinctions. In Watchmen’s fatalistic aesthetic, the yellow orbs drawn as clocks, radiation hazard signs, and happy faces suggest impending disaster, nuclear fallout, and sinister ironies which are a long way from the faithful moral background that guides Superman and Wonder Woman.

#7 Metaphorical and Metonymical Identity

admin — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 10:39:34 +0000

The discord between the superhero’s secret and actual identity plays havoc with the metaphorical dimension of identity, where an individual can substitute "I" for a function or a name: I am a fireman; I am Bruce Wayne. The concept of the “alter ego” makes identity fundamentally ironic, like the picture of the rabbit/duck that could be either thing, depending on which way you look at it.

Moreover, this bifurcation or alternation of identity carries the additional irony of actually grounding identity by stopping it from floating away in ghostly metonymies. In other words, the either/or of the alter ego prevents both amorphousness of identity and a never ending list of possible identities. Fun Home dwells on the way Alison and her father invoke the metonymies of gender identity. Bruce has his obsession with decoration, design, flowers and so forth, while Alison has her “masculine” clothes and the nickname “Butch.” However, Bruce's “gay” metonymies compete with those of the heterosexual family man living in a small town.

His inability to substitute “I” with “gay” means that he represses the “symptoms” of his homosexual identity, or tucks them away in secret corners. By hiding something away, Bruce actually gives himself substance. He is something “other” than he appears—just like Peter Parker or Bruce Wayne—and this otherness prevents him from disappearing into the banality of failed family man. As far as Alison is concerned, Bruce has to be reconstructed as his alter ego.

The rehabilitation of the father is a necessary element of Alison's origin story, which develops to the point where she is able to make the metaphorical gesture--“I am a Lesbian”--line up perfectly with the metonymies that go with it. It is as if Alison were able to declare herself Batman and never take off the costume, the tool belt and so forth. By telling the story of her father as closeted gay man, Alison attempts to perform the same gesture for her father. The gesture is figuratively successful, as Bruce comes to “represent” the small-town homosexual of the 1970s.

A detour through Daniel Clowe's Ghost World helps to illustrate the power of Alison Bechdel's metaphorical identity. Enid Coleslaw in Ghost World offers an example of identity that is all metonymy and no metaphor. She is unable to solve for the X of identity, so she compensates by having a series of “looks”--punk rocker, 1930s woman—one thing after another. Enid is like a superhero who cannot settle on a particular costume or alter ego. Her greatest desire is to find one look and stick with it, but that appears to be impossible. When Enid purchases what looks like a Batman or Catwoman mask at Adam’s II sex shop, her mocking of the superhero’s fetishistic costume also mocks her own inability to fill the mask, to be something under it.

Consequently, Enid dissolves. At one point, her best friend Becky says that Enid is getting blurry, difficult to see. The ghosts of Ghost World are the looks that Enid produces, representing her inability to anchor her identity. Alison’s discovery of her sexual identity in Fun Home shows why identity politics are so powerful: they give the appearances and associations that go with an identification substance because they are ostensibly rooted, no longer free floating ghosts. They anchor metonymies in a powerful metaphor.

#8 Aesthetic Metaphors and Character Identity

admin — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 11:21:53 +0000

In the graphic narrative, identity is iconic; represented through costume, aesthetic style, and visual metaphor. However, identity in graphic narrative is also represented through a fracturing of reader expectations set by the medium itself. Prone to reading left to right, joining images over blank gutters, and assembling various elliptical moments, readers of the graphic narrative constantly assemble and disassemble identities and the narratives that give those identities their shape.

Following the principles of reader participation outlined above, the aesthetic principles that inform representations of identity in the graphic narrative deserve closer scrutiny. If we take as a normative model the fractured central character that dominates the genre, the reassembly and disassembly of the reader plays an important role in the reader’s ongoing interpretation of the text. Unlike other literary forms, how something looks on the page is central to the understanding of a character’s identity. Central to representing the fractured and disillusioned central characters that dominate the graphic narrative—and indeed the examples explored here so far: Jimmy Corrigan, Bruce Wayne, the superheroes of Watchmen, and Bruce Bechdel—is the fractured pagespace. Virtually all graphic narratives violate the expectations of the genre at some point: crossing gutters, combining panels, repeating imagery across panels. Rarely does the traditional 9, 12, 16 panel grid remain intact over the course of a full-length narrative. In particular, narratives that feature characters in search of an identity emphasize the aesthetic possibilities offered by fracturing the expectations of the medium. These artistic choices—breaking the border, splitting characters in half, obscuring details—represent a further metaphor through which the reader can engage with and conceptualize emerging, and collapsing, identities. These aesthetic metaphors, in which the fractured expectations of the genre stand in for latent or emergent psychological or physical states, work much like literary tropes such as irony, self-referential narrative voices, dialects / dictions / alliterations, or a suddenly altered narrative sequence. And, as with literary tropes, aesthetic metaphors have varying degrees of interpretive complexity. On a somewhat simplistic level, the artist relies on subtle shifts in the frame to indicate time and, to some extend, emotion. In the above panels from Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, the suicide of a man in a Superman suit is recorded not in the continuous tracking of his fall, but in the presentation of a before and after sequence. Subtle changes in the composition of the panels—a car moves out of the frame, the cyclist moves on, some people move forward, the red and blue figure move from top of the building to the pavement—suggest the passage of time. Moreover, the positioning of the figures in the frame suggest varying degrees of acknowledgment and attention. What the frames capture is silence and stasis, two of the main thematic elements of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. The static and unchanging art, then, stands in for Jimmy Corrigan’s static and unchanging identity. Another aesthetic metaphor is represented through Bruce Bechdel’s superhuman power to “spin garbage… into gold.” While certainly his skills at making something good out of something lousy reflect an ongoing metaphor in the novel about Bruce’s coping mechanism for an unfulfilled life in a heterosexual prison, the art does not represent the “garbage” and the “gold” any differently. Both appear in the same blue and white palette, with the same artistic signature of Alison Bechdel. This approach reinforces Bruce’s own dissatisfaction with his attempts to turn garbage into gold: they are ultimately unsuccessful, the do not help him cope, and the world remains coloured by the pressure of his repressed identity. That “He was an alchemist of appearance, a savant of surface, a Daedalus of décor” is a further nod to his command of surface representations. Indeed, Daedalus curses his own creations, and laments that they are the cause for all his strife. The aesthetic metaphors plays out further when one considers Alison Bechdel’s artistic signature. The drawing is neither “realistic” nor inadequate. In fact, the art itself further suggests the issues of surface representation, which can never hope to capture the complex depths of a character’s identity. To this end, note Bechdel’s fractured head when her character confronts her father’s corpse. Disengaged from all the surface elements that identified her father, she resorts to finding another marker that will identify him. Neither the mark, nor the “revealed” Bruce Bechdel are apparent in Alison Bechdel’s artwork. However, the psychological shock of her father’s corpse is represented through the divided head, which is disassembled by the gutter.

The fractured representation of a central character is a common artistic trope for characters who are wrestling with repressed or emergent identities. Returning to Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, we see Jimmy divided across three panels by Chris Ware. Occurring at the moment he confronts his sister in the hospital, the page and panels suggest levels of irony and emotional resonance not present in the words, or indeed the narrative itself. The ironic referentiality of Jimmy’s sniffling nose, Superman sweatshirt and fractured leg evokes the juvenile nature of Jimmy’s identity and the “unsuperness” of his character. As well, the panels, which fracture Jimmy’s body, also end at his fractured leg, further reinforcing his broken identity. Moving across the page, the panels frequently juxtapose Jimmy and his sister emphasizing similarities and oppositions. While their may well be racial—or colour (red / blue)—differences, the emotional resonance of the situation transcends.

Again, Ware’s artistic signature slows down the action in order to have the reader assemble and reassemble the situation in which Jimmy finds himself. The reader takes part in the same mental gymnastics of comprehension that Jimmy himself is going through. Like Jimmy, the reader struggles to make sense of the situation and to make sense of Jimmy’s emotional state. In short, through the aesthetic metaphors in the panels above, the reader actively participates in the identity crisis that preoccupies Jimmy Corrigan. The visual cues push the reader to engage actively in reassembling the broken character—be it Jimmy Corrigan, or Bruce Bechdel. Finally, the artistic elements noted above can be brought together to emphasize or exaggerate the reader’s stake in a character’s identity. Perhaps the best encapsulation of the kind of dominant fractured identity we have been discussing is one of Batman’s arch nemeses: Harvey Dent, or “Two-Face.” One of the more innovative manoeuvres of Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns is his breaking of the expectations of the genre. Miller frequently erases panel lines, eliminates gutters, and complicates the logic of the pagespace in order to emphasize elements of a character’s identity. In the example below, we are introduced to the supposedly reformed Two-Face. Zooming in on Arkham Asylum, we are first greeted by The Joker in room 601, as we pass to room 602—by no accident an even number; where The Joker is odd, Harvey is at least “even”—the representation of Harvey Dent is split over two panels by a gutter. Dividing the conversation of the short and tall doctors, and metaphorically insinuating Harvey’s still-fractured psyche, the gutter makes the reader reassemble Harvey into the villain s/he knows.

The reader’s reconstruction of Harvey Dent and the panel’s eventual merging to represent an obscured, “cured,” Two-Face creates a tension in what the artist represents and what the reader performs. Like the two doctors, the reader consistently works to repair the fractured character represented in the narrative. The reader’s reconstruction of the character, fractured by the story-teller’s reliance on memory, masks, and metaphor is the ultimately salvation of the character’s identity. Like Bruce Bechdel, the author of the graphic narrative represents a fractured or obscured version of reality—one which answers to the expectations of the craft.

Indeed, the role of the artist in representing character in the graphic novel is as a Daedalus-like figure who is constantly both inventing and disassembling labyrinths of identity, history, and narrative.

#10 Echoes and Eco: The Infinite Return

admin — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 08:01:51 +0000

While the graphic narrative for the most part has its roots in the forward-thinking mythologies of science-fiction, the medium is nonetheless dominated by memoir, the re-telling of tales told, and after-the-fact reportage. In particular, longer graphic narratives, those which have come to be called graphic novels, are dominated by the narrative structures of the memoir and detective fiction, both of which involve the recounting of an already played-out scenario. Both Will Eisner's A Contract with God and Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer-Prize-winning Maus are memoir--in the case of the latter a second-hand memoir--while Frank Miller's re-imagining of the superhero-detective Batman in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and the detective epic Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons evolve through an unravelling of entwined narrative moments. In short, a medium which often responds to the optimism and anxieties of the future is often steeped in a deep-seated reckoning with the past. At the same time, the vast majority of characters in graphic narratives are dealing with their pasts or issues associated with the past. Alison Bechdel tries to make sense of both her father's and her own past; Spiegelman grapples with the Holocaust and his own relationship with his father; Jimmy Corrigan sets out on a crusade to find his missing father, and family heritage; Bruce Wayne wrestles awkwardly with retirement in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns; the characters in Watchmen reckon with pasts both their own and of others. Even Superman is ultimately dealing with being an orphan on a strange planet eking out a renewed history because he has lost his own. Perhaps the most evident example of an artist / author grappling with narratives of the past is Art Speigelmen's direct address to the guilt he begins to feel about the success of his graphic novel Maus. Rendering himself literally drawing on the backs of his executed ancestors, Spiegelman recognizes that his heritage--and the horrors associated with it--is at once providing a story / narrative sequence and increasingly forcing his "present" self to confront the diverse meanings and interpretations his aesthetic creates for that heritage. In other words, as he investigates his past--or more appropriately, his parents' past--the story draws to a close and there is less and less to feed his creativity as his aesthetically original cat / mouse / dog / pig metaphors play themselves out. The image above suggests other possible interpretations. For instance, the image invokes the millions of dead stories that went nowhere--that just stopped dead--upon which Spiegelman is building his own narrative. In a sense, Spiegelman is writing out the futures of all these dead souls through his encounters with his father’s survival narrative. Of course, the central point here is that Spiegelman does not tell his father's story, or his mother's (lost in her death and missing diary), but the story of his own revelation about his father's story. The story--if it can be charitably called that--of the holocaust has been told many times and many ways, Spiegelman's re-telling is in his interpretation of it--and this is where the reader's attention and interest lie. On the other hand, Will Eisner simply announces that he is telling stories already told:

The tenements give Eisner an opportunity to share his vision of childhood through his aesthetic--one often identified as the pinnacle of New York comics. The stories in Contract with God are not Eisner's but told through Eisner who fills in the aesthetic details and renders the overheard narratives tangible. Indeed, every non-superhero graphic narrative we have dealt with so far works its narrative through memory and revelation (the detective narrative): Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy and Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. The analysis gets a little more complicated when we move to investigate graphic narratives involving superheroes. Given that superhero narratives are not have--at their base--the biographical influence of the graphic novels discussed above, it might seem less relevant to examine the role of temporality in the narrative. However, as mentioned above, given the medium's roots in science fiction, its reliance on narratives of the past and particularly the structures of mythology demands attention. Any mention of graphic narrative and mythology calls to mind Umberto Eco’s essay "The Myth of Superman." It's worth noting how his theoretical approach to understanding Superman's temporality confirms the overwhelming presence of the past in the structures the underlie the medium. Speaking to Superman’s dual identity as both "mild-mannered" Clark Kent and Superman, Eco notes that "In terms of narrative, Superman's double identity has a function since it permits the suspense characteristic of a detective story and great variation in the mode of narrating our hero's adventures, his ambiguities, his histrionics" (Eco 15). In other words, we can delve into the back-stories of two characters, who nonetheless share the same body. The medium--particularly in the superhero genre’s dual identity structures--relies on a narrative that fills in the details of a character’s past. Continuing his line of analysis, Eco argues that "Such a character will take on what we will call an 'aesthetic universality,' a capacity to serve as a reference point for behaviour and feelings which belong to us all. He does not contain the universality of myth, nor does he become an archetype, the emblem of a supernatural reality. He is the result of a universal rendering of a particular and eternal event. The character of a novel is a 'historic type.' Therefore, to accommodate this character, the aesthetics of the novel must revive an old category particularly necessary when art abandons the territory of myth; this we may term the 'typical'" (Eco 15). Eco’s nod to the "typical" here calls to mind the overwhelming "typicalness" of characters such as Jimmy Corrigan who, while toying radically with the tropes of the superhero narrative, nevertheless feature individuals who are more typical than heroic, more wrapped in their past than in their present. In short, because the superhero narrative does not provide a archetypal or mythological model for the medium, creativity can focus on the typical or, more precisely, the mythology of the typical wherein readers are directed to journey while the lives of typical individuals are revealed through a structure more responsive to the transmutable identities (often secret) of superheroes. Gone is the mythological hero who arrives fully formed as a model for the Just life, and whose adventures serve to reinforce his moral justness. In its place is the empty shell of a typical individual whose identity is revealed through the gradual revelation of minutiae which may or may not justify that individual’s reason for being. Furthermore, "The mythological character of comic strips finds himself in this singular situation: he must be an archetype, the totality of certain collective aspirations, and therefore, he must necessarily become immobilized in an emblematic and fixed nature which renders him easily recognizable (this is what happens to Superman); but since he is marketed in the sphere of a ‘romantic’ production for a public that consumes 'romances,' he must be subjected to a development which is typical, as we have seen, of novelistic characters" (Eco 15). The characters and narratives of the graphic narrative are therefore representative of our "collective aspirations"--that we all possess the potential to be Superman, or the potential to examine our pasts with the insight of someone like Bechdel--but fixed within a fairly simplistic revelatory structure that involves the constant "filling in" of missing details. In his explanation of this structure of character and narrative development, Eco argues that "Superman's script writers have devised a solution which is much shrewder and undoubtedly more original. The stories develop in a kind of oneiric climate--of which the reader is not aware at all--where what has happened before and what has happened after appears extremely hazy. The narrator picks up the strand of the event again and again as if he had forgotten to say something and wanted to add details to what had already been said" (Eco 17). Indeed, the lazy critic of the graphic narrative could quickly offer that every story in the medium is essentially a retelling of a genesis narrative, one that has its roots in the historical structures of Western story-telling. However, Eco's continued analysis provides insight into how we might interpret the overwhelming presence of historiography in the graphic narrative:

It occurs, then, that along with Superman stories, Superboy stories are told, that is, stories of Superman when he was a boy, or a tiny child under the name of Superbaby. At a certain point, Supergirl appears on the scene. She is Superman's cousin and she, too, escaped from the destruction of Krypton. All of the events concerning Superman are retold in one way or another in order to account for the presence of this new character (who has hitherto not been mentioned, because, it is explained, she has lived in disguise in a girls' school, awaiting puberty, at which time she could come out into the world; the narrator goes back in time to tell in how many and in which cases she, of whom nothing was said, participated during those many adventures where we saw Superman alone involved). One imagines, using the solution of travel through time, that Supergirl, Superman's contemporary, can encounter Superboy in the past and be his playmate; and even Superboy, having broken the time barrier by sheer accident, can encounter Superman, his own self of many years later. (Eco 17)

In other words, the true power of the medium is how open it is to retelling and renewal. While the scaffolding may be similar, the aesthetics consistently rework external appearances--an apt way of understanding the dual identities at work in the Superhero who is both “super” and "typical"; "surface" and "secret." As Eco concludes, "In Superman stories the time that breaks down is the _time of the story_, that is, the notion of time which ties one episode to another. In the sphere of a story, Superman accomplishes a given job (he routs a band of gangsters); at this point the story ends. In the same comic book, or in the edition of the following week, a new story begins" (Eco 17). Indeed, it may well be that the episodic foundations of the medium encourage an aesthetics that revisits and reconsiders its subject-matter. At the same time, however, the medium is acutely aware of its own repetitive tendencies, and its aesthetics, structures, tropes, and characters continually offer a self-referential glance at the medium’s limits. In fact, the vast majority of the successful graphic narratives delve headlong into the limits of representation, particularly if that representation entails the repeated revelation of secret identities, or narrative histories. The strength is not necessarily in the originality of the tale, but in the originality of the re-telling. Far from being forward-thinking or metaphoric of technological or scientific anxieties, the supernatural characteristics of the medium’s characters and narratives are merely smokescreens for the aesthetics of re-telling, merely ways of manipulating echoes from the past. The story has already been told, it’s the details we’re interested in exploring and it’s the details that receive the most direct aesthetic attention. Even a character like Sherlock Holmes, a man of details and supernatural cranial powers, has his stories told through the after-the-fact reportage of Watson, who bears out the revelatory process, the conclusion to which, he already knows. In the end, what gets revealed are not the superpowers or the moral fortitude, but the slow revelation of the superhero's character flushed out by trips back in time, through the consistent re-telling of stories told, and the ever-present after-the-fact reportage. A typical character shows us a typical story of a typical event in an extraordinary way. In comic books, despite the super-natural, super-mechanical, or super-atomic causations, everything has already happened. All that's left is to reveal the unlimited intricacies of character, or to embellish the narrative.

#9 Nothing to See Here: Graphic Narrative and the Sublime

admin — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 01:37:41 +0000

The most interesting graphic narratives emphasize the problem of trying to see something that cannot be seen, where rather than being worth a thousand words, a picture is no substitute for any number of words, as it testifies to something missing. Thus the “crude,” “primitive,” “impoverished” art of the cartoon engages with the sublime: the overwhelming concept that has no representation. In Fun Home Alison dreams of leading Bruce up a wooded hill to see perfect sunset. In the dream, however, Bruce is too late and misses the image. What we see is a blankness, as if Bechdel had taken her eraser to the page to “undraw” nothing. This is an allegorical dream moment because homosexuality is a sublime concept for Bruce, something that cannot be represented. For Alison, because of her ability to be “out” and “open,” it is beautiful, everywhere expressible. Alison gets to see the image, while Bruce sees only empty space. In Ghost World, hints of a world elsewhere abound, from the graffiti of the title (Enid sees the phantom tagger disappearing out of frame in one instance), to the name “Norman” (which we can easily and appropriately shorten to “Norm”) etched in the sidewalk over and over again, to a pair of abandoned pants in the street. These surpluses signify a deficit: who is leaving these signs lying around in the world? The signs culminate in the bus out of town on the cancelled line that carries Enid away at the end of the narrative. Clowes keeps us guessing as to whether the world that we see drawn in the frames is “Ghost World” or the unseen world that is pointed to but never shown. In Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware draws frame after frame of scenery, and empty world with no people in it. Our eyes are drawn into the frame and the effect is a synaesthetic one: silence. No words, just images of space that create a tension, a need to be populated. The page keeps asking us, “what are you looking at?” Jimmy Corrigan produces the effect of simultaneously being jam packed and empty. The frames are shrunk down so we have to squint to see them. Several pages are filled with tiny, almost unreadable text. Ware appears to be working “around” something that can be neither written nor drawn. Thought of in the terms of literary criticism, Jimmy Corrigan fits the bill of Umberto Eco’s “open” text, or Roland Barthes’ “writerly” text--the kind of book that resists cooptation by its reader and refuses to be “about anything,” that refuses to be “transparent” or to have its machinery appear invisible as the plot works its magic. Jimmy Corrigan challenges the reader to to see the “nothing” that it is about. Or to put it another way, the book tells us that no matter how much we can see, we are still missing something. Jimmy Corrigan’s quest to find his father in Michigan echoes Ahab’s quest to kill the white whale in Moby-Dick to eradicate the whiteness, the bar on vision, the screen that stands between us and the perception of reality, truth. And just as Ishmael’s discursive commentary weaves thousands of words around that whiteness, undercutting Ahab’s linear quest, Ware’s drawing weaves hundreds of images that counter Jimmy’s hope for familial resolution. Rorschach in Watchmen whose unstable, shape-shifting “mask” throws onto the reader (viewer?) the responsibility for making sense of the blot; Ernesto in Jason Lutes’ Jar of Fools whose face is often left blank, making him look like a rag doll; Clark Kent’s glasses that render Superman invisible--these are all examples of the graphic narrative reminding its readers of the precariousness of seeing. What you see is not what you get, but, paradoxically, what you don’t get.

#11 Mourning, Memory, and the Alter Ego

admin — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 04:42:49 +0000

David Mazzucchelli, author of Asterios Polyp, drew for Daredevil and Batman for DC so he well-knows the terrain of superheroes and secret identities. At first glance, Asterios Polyp, the story of an architect, has little to do with masked figures. Nevertheless, Asterios’ story is haunted by doubleness and an identity schism; it is narrated by his twin brother, Ignazio, who was still-born. The narrative structure of Asterios Polyp is a curious one: Asterios is presented, drawn, and discussed, but he rarely speaks for himself, in brief speech bubbles. The narrator, meanwhile, is the source of Asterios’ trauma, unseen by Asterios except in fantasy or dream. In one scene with his wife, Hana, where Asterios explains why he has video cameras set up throughout his apartment, he confesses the absence that Ignazio’s death has left in his life. Everything in Asterios’ work as an architect testifies to this absence. His buildings are all twinned structures, and Asterios expresses pleasure at the twin towers of the World Trade Center: “The brilliance of it is that there are two of them” (112). But Asterios is a “paper architect,” which means that his buildings exist only as drawings; none of them have ever been built. The implication is that the absence of Ignazio not only inspires these twin structures but also prevents them from becoming real. The buildings are impossible. Also impossible for Asterios is a relationship. In spite of the hole in his life, Asterios is too full of himself, compensating perhaps for his lack. He is egotistical and vain. He marries a sculptor, Hana Sonnenschein, but appears unable to give her equal billing in his life. When she finds success designing sets for the choreographer, Willy Illium, he grows jealous. We might say that just as the super-hero’s alter ego puts a spanner in the works of his or her romantic life, Asterios’ absent twin does the same for him. The marriage breaks up and Asterios finds himself stranded, once again “split up.” In the opening sequence of frames, Asterios is dissolute, post-relationship with Hana. His apartment is in disarray: plants are dead or dying; bottles, food remains, and newspapers are scattered across the living room. A stack of overdraft notices and unpaid bills lies beside the old-fashioned telephone. He is unshaven on his bed watching a sex tape, flicking a Zippo lighter. A lightning strike hits his apartment building and the ensuing fire destroys everything he has, as if it were an apocalyptic erasure of his current life: the death of his old world and the birth of a new one.He escapes the building with the clothes on his back, a Zippo lighter, a Swiss army knife, and a watch. On his fiftieth birthday, Asterios Polyp is suddenly a tabula rasa, or at least the illusion of a tabula rasa. He escapes New York City for a fictional town called Apogee, whose name tells us that Asterios is at the furthest point from whatever it is he is orbiting: the traumatic kernel of his twinship. He gives up architecture to become an auto mechanic and takes up with the garage owner’s family. Like many literary apocalypses, Asterios’ is a failed one. Even at the farthest point from his identity center, alterity continues to haunt him. Stiffly, the garage owner, calls him “Stereo” and Stiffly’s son, Running Dog, has an alter ego of his own in an imaginary friend, mimicking Asterios’ dilemma. Asterios can get far away from his existential crisis, but there is no doubt that he is still bound by its orbit. A pivotal moment occurs when Asterios loses an eye when he is attacked in a bar. The loss of his eye affects his depth perception through parallax or stereopsis. His “twin” vision is no longer possible; he becomes a cyclops. While lying in hospital, Asterios dreams that he drives his smoking Saab into the Apogee garage to find Ignazio working there. As Ignazio recounts his story, which is Asterios’ story, Asterios gets angrier and angrier and strikes him with a wrench. He feels that his dead twin is not only mirroring him but mocking him. When he’s well enough, Asterios drives to Minnesota (the Twin Cities) for a reunion with Hana. The secret identity of the super hero, when seen through the lens of Asterios Polyp, perhaps testifies to an inherent “otherness” of the self, a self elsewhere, that can be either idealized or diminished, depending on the psychological disposition of the subject. The superhero’s appeal lies in the possibility of being something or someone else. But maybe we are always someone else whenever we look in the mirror or even just think about ourselves. Just as Asterios wonders if he is somehow living Ignazio’s life, we might wonder if we are living someone else’s life, or at least a life not our own. We don’t need to have had a still-born twin to “shadowed” like Asterios is. Furthermore, Asterios Polyp suggests that in spite of all our efforts to disavow this otherness, it may be inevitable. Just as Asterios appears to have abandoned his double vision or parallax for a more humble unity, a meteorite hurtles towards Hana’s house as Asterios sits with her in her living room.

#47 Sites of Visual and Textual Innovation Day 3

admin — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 03:56:08 +0000

OK, so this post is even further delayed than I expected. I began this post on November 12. I am presenting the days of the Instituto Franklin comics conference in Alcala in a messed up order because I have been too busy attending panels to post anything about day 2. As day 3 remains fresh in my mind, I'll return to day 2 when I have more leisure. From my perspective, the last day was perhaps the best for me in terms of developing my own understanding of how comics work. The early morning "Theory" session featured Chris Kuipers, a fellow alumnus from the University of California, Irvine, arguing that the graphic novel as the latest "royal genre," following on from the novel and the epic in "Epic, Roman, Graphic Novel: Three Royal Genres". A "royal" genre governs the way literature is thought about in any particular era, embodying the technology of the period, which is partly responsible for its transformation and incorporation of previous genres. The comic's engagement with web technology is a component of its potential for dominance. Kuipers pointed out that "graphic novel" is a weak term for this kind of text; it is a term trying to gain credibility from a past genre, and does not adequately represent what long form comics are. Barbara Tversky, a cognitive psychologist from Stanford, presented a fascinating talk ("Aspects of Depictions in Graphic Narratives") about how comics are perceived in terms of action and complexity, dependent on culture. Her discussion started with visual (iconic?) instructions, such as a blow-up diagram and instructions on how to put together a bookshelf, and related how the mind processes them to the way it processes a comic. Nicolas Thiessen, in "You Don't Know How to Read a Comic" took issue with formalist approaches to reading comics, suggesting that the intuited pattern of moving from left to right and top to bottom was in no way a necessity. His argument hinged on the Heideggerian notion of equipment, which has no existence as equipment separate from its use. Likewise, form does not inhere in a comic, but rather is imposed on it through our reading of it. Perhaps my favorite presentation from a session on experimental narrative was Ian Horton on "Information Design, Experimental Comic Books, and Narrative Form." Again, Ikea and Habitat instructions played their role in getting at how comics work. He then moved on to Will Eisner's comics instructions for the US army to address issues of complexity and functionality in these instructions. Horton challenged the notion that representing instructions visually through comics does not necessarily simplify matters. H then discussed Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library #20, popularly known as Lint to show the elements of information design that Ware has incorporated into his overtly aestheticized work. The keynote, and closing, speech of the day was Charles Hatfield appraising the state of independent comics in 2011. Hatfield used four examples: Adrian Tomine's latest issue of Optic Nerve , the latest issue of the Hernandez brothers Love and Rockets, a licensed Simpsons property, Treehouse of Horror, and an experimental comics broadsheet, Pood. Hatfield discussed the impact of large publishing companies like Bertelsmann and MacMillan taking on Drawn and Quarterly and Fantagraphics titles, the diminishing power of the direct market comics shop model, and the way that "graphic novels" as long form "high end" texts have perhaps eclipsed the "floppy," as the slim, soft-covered, stapled comic is commonly known. As what was formerly been independent has been co-opted by the mainstream, Hatfield, sees mini comics and webcomics as the new inhabitants of the independent realm. In giving synopses of these talks, I am sure that I have distorted them. In order to correct that distortion, you should seek out the published versions of these papers which are sure to come out.

#48 Sites of Visual and Textual Innovation Day 2

admin — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 06:11:09 +0000

At long last, I report on my second day at the First International Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels in Alcala de Henares, Spain. These are, of course, just highlights from my perspective. And I invite any correction to my presentation of these talks. Pedro Moura, "A Typology of Experimentation in Comics" Moura presented a fascinating tour through the various manifestations of avant garde, non-narrative comics. Moura follows Deleuze and Guattari in seeking an absolutely deterritorialized comics, a minor comics. That is, he is not interested in comics that "experiment" only to re-assert conventional storytelling and meaning. Rather, he seeks a kind of comic that is only comic, not a vehicle for narrative content. Thomas Byers, "Comix Theory: The Justice League of Europe's Attack on Deconstruction" Byers presented a critique of phallic displacement in a little-known DC comic in which the Justice League of Europe, under the temporary leadership of Batman, take on "Deconstructo" a villain who espouses a kind of aesthetic nihilism and relativism. Byers reads the comic as a typical attack on deconstruction, aligning it with the New York Times' notorious obituary for Jacques Derrida. Byers turns the comic on its head, revealing its anxiety over the loss of the phallus. He justified the Lacanian turn in his argument because of the way that all theory tends to be lumped together in the eyes of its detractors. Jose Alaniz, "Czech Comics Anthropology: Life and Story in Keva" Alaniz discussed the project of ASTA SME which combines comics and anthropology. Keva is one volume in a trilogy focusing on the Roma in the Czech republic. Keva is the youngest and most integrated of the three subjects. The novel element of this comic is the way it engages with the life of the subject. For instance, the authors asked Keva how she wished to be drawn in the text. Her response was a composite of pop culture icons. She wanted the legs of Mariah Carey, for instance. Alaniz referred to this kind of text as a "negotiated story," in which the subject participates in his or her construction. Alaniz discussed the range of drawing styles in the book, from cartoony to something approaching photo-realism. This range demonstrates the power of comics to "comment" on the content under representation. The talk was fascinating, and Keva is probably worth picking up even though it has not been translated into English. Simon Grennan, "Demonstrating Discours: Two Comic Strip Projects in Self Constraint" Grennan's main point was that comics narratology has focused on "histoire," what is told, rather than "discours," the putting into action of the story, or the "telling to." Grennan used a page from Seth's Clyde Fans and Mike Madden's 99 Ways to Tell A Story. Each of these texts works with a constraint. Seth restricts himself to the temporal and stylistic conventions of the New Yorker magazine, with nothing appearing that is not "American" or post 1960, while Madden writes the same story over and over again according to different generic principles. Grennan argued that Seth's work made sense in terms of discours, while Madden's simply repeated his own style over and over again. In other words, Seth's working within the constraint works, while Madden's doesn't because "discours" contradicts "histoire," particularly in the version of his story that employs the fantasy genre.

Graphixia Podcasts

admin — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 07:04:23 +0000

Subscribe on iTunes Episode 7: Trauma, History, and Chocolate Pretzels Episode 6: A Different Levels of "Scottness": A New Year Grab Bag Episode 5: A Discussion of Spider-Man comics Episode 4: Chester Brown's Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography Episode 3: Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth Episode 2: Who's Reading Watchmen? Episode 1: Thinking About the Graphic Narrative

About Us

admin — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 06:54:35 +0000

Graphixia is a collaborative comics blog published weekly on Tuesdays. The core members and writers are

Brenna Clarke Gray, PhD, English Department, Douglas College

Scott Marsden, MA, MLIS, Librarian, Alexander College

Peter Wilkins, PhD, English Department and Training Group, Douglas College

David N. Wright, PhD, English Department, Coordinator, Research and Innovation Office, Project Lead: The Digital Cultures Lab Douglas College.

We invite other contributors. If you would like to write something for Graphixia, please read the following style sheet and send an email to Peter Wilkins.

The Thursday Page

admin — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 21:39:14 +0000

Thursday Feb. 14, 2013 - Owly and Wormy Teach Us to Read A recent trip to that icon of comicshops The Beguiling in Toronto and its sister store Little Island Comics—apparently North America’s first comicshop for kids—introduced me to the books of Andy Runton. He writes / draws a fantastic series called Owly & Wormy. The books contain virtually no words, instead relying on a sequence of events and the character’s expressionism to carry the story forward.

The books struck me immediately as an example of something Peter and I have been pushing for some time: the argument that comics require an education in reading as much as text does, maybe even moreso. What Runton’s books also make apparent is how reading is, at its base, a creative activity; reading is generative.

While the basic narrative of the Owly and Wormy books would be the same for everyone, the intricacies of the story would not. Runton’s books force the reader of his books to both interpret and create what’s on the page. When I read the books to my two-year-old, I have to come up with the words. When my five-year-old reads the book without me, he comes up with an entirely different set of words and emotions to go with the image sequence. Everything is in play: the white space is there to be filled. What’s amazing about the way one encounters Runton’s books is the manner in which we write the story based on the pictures.

Reading Runton means reading for signs of character emotion, clues for sequence, and generally interpreting what images Runton has put down on the page. However, reading here also involves making decisions about what language might be added to describe, augment, and accelerate the sequence of images that form the story. There are spaces where language is needed, but not always. Runton’s books really make you account for the silences in comics and for the amount of work an image can do on its own, without language.

The value in Runton’s books is in how they teach us how to read and make reading into a self-reflective practice. What becomes apparent is how valuable comics are in teaching people the skills needed to read with depth. By making reading into both an interpretive and a creative act (both occurring at the same time even), Runton forces us to engage with the page in a way we often avoid.

Runton makes us better readers. Comics make us better readers. The amount of work that goes into interpreting and creating Runton’s work is in some ways ruined by the imposition of language. Where language and text tend to lock down interpretation, images merely rein it in a little; the image doesn’t signify pure abstraction, it is something, but the intricacies of what it signifies are left to the able reader.

admin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

admin — Tue, 08 Dec 2015 18:13:17 +0000

#12 "I don't want you should mention": Image / Text and the Authenticity of Memoir

admin — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 14:15:09 +0000

What's our relationship to the author(s) of a graphic narrative? More precisely how much trust is involved in our interpretation of the author's representation? While these questions certainly reek with the beginnings of a 1980's theory conversation, they point to an interesting sidebar to the act of reading a graphic narrative: we tend to think the meaning is obvious. And why wouldn't we think the meaning's obvious? There are pictures after all. If the reader is confused by the text, she can look at the image for clarification. If she vexed by the image, the reader can look to the text for explanation. What's interesting is how this sense of certainty in the reader's ability to interpret meaning can lead her to overlook some narrative conflicts in the telling of the tale. Let's take as an example Art Spiegelman's acclaimed graphic narrative Maus. As it explores the experiences of Spiegelman's father during the holocaust, the novel also explores the relationship between the father telling the tale and the son who is retelling the tale being told in graphic form. One of the things readers come to expect when we encounter a memoir such as Spiegelman's is verisimilitude; we want to believe the stories are faithfully rendered--especially when those stories deal with a difficult subject such as the holocaust. Unlike pure fiction, we expect the memoir to be true, or at least "true enough." For better or worse, as we immerse ourselves in the narrative of the memoir, we tend to forget that the memoir, like the picture it paints, is often constructed, put together, reassembled. Maus opens with diversion, and it's a telling moment in the story. It represents the first moment where the reader can pinpoint a breakdown between the story Vladek is telling and the story Spiegelman is drawing on the page. The first chapter in Maus, "The Sheik," focuses on Vladek's early life before the holocaust, what Vladek deems a private moment. For Vladek, the story is clearly the holocaust, not him. However, Spiegelman has other motivations that creep into the rendering of his father's tale. The first hint that Spiegelman may not be representing his father's accounts accurately comes when Spiegelman draws Vladek on a bicycle saying he "looked just like Rudolph Valentino."

To most readers, the comment is read as an exaggeration of Vladek's handsomeness and Spiegelman's drawing of the old man hunched over his stationary bike, cycling, doesn't help confirm the reader's sense that Vladek is exaggerating. Right away readers are positioned, by virtue of how and what Spiegelman is showing us, to question the accuracy of Vladek's story-telling and the extent to which it is "true."

Another instance of Spiegelman's manipulation of his father's account comes at the end of the diversion. After Vladek asks his son not tell the story in his comic book, Spiegelman promises not to tell the story:

Of course, the story has already been told at this point, and the broken promise revealed to the reader. Again, the reader is forced to question the relationship between the story as it was told (Vladek's story) and how it is being told to the reader (Spiegelman's story). Suddenly, reading the graphic narrative just got very complex; the reader cannot help but wonder: whose story is this? And, whose images of the past am I looking at? With great frequency throughout the novel, Spiegelman's images contextualize--and distort--Vladek's past. The images, while certainly heightening the visceral resonance of Vladek's holocaust narrative, still distort the reader's reception of that narrative; this is not Vladek's story, it is Spiegelman's. The images, rather than clarifying and illuminating the narrative, distort the verisimilitude of Vladek's memoir.

This complexity is compounded by the nature of the subject being addressed in the memoir. The reader is--and often rightly--reluctant to challenge the authenticity of the Survivor's Tale. However, careful readers and good critics know that the brutality of the subject is no reason enough to avoid delving into questions of representation. Moreover, by including the opening chapter diversion away from the dominant subject-matter of the novel, Spiegleman leaves the door open for this kind of resistant interpretive questioning by the reader. To this end, the opening aphorism that prefaces the book offers yet another telling juxtaposition. Quoting Hitler, the book opens with the lines "The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human." Without question sinister words by a madman, but words that, given Spiegelman's aesthetic decisions rendering characters in the book, reflect the tangible reality to follow in the creative narrative. Indeed, in Maus, the Jews are not human; they're mice. Does Spiegelman's aesthetic decision to represent Jews as mice reflect or mock Hitler's comment? What about all the other non-humans in the novel: Germans = Cats / Poles = pigs? In short, the images Spiegelman gives us don't really help us to comprehend or contextualize Hitler's text, or even understand why Spiegelman put it at the beginning of his book. In fact, Hitler's claim oddly complicates, or problematizes, the intended meaning for text and image in the novel. Finally, there's the visual metaphors that play off of Vladek's stationary bike. Tending to appear at the beginning of each of Vladek's recollections about his Holocaust experience, the bike suggests a kind of "spinning of wheels" and both mocks and downgrades Vladek's story-telling while it elevates Spiegleman's.

There is little question that Spiegelman is the artist here and the old man is just spinning tales the same way he has told them over and over and over. At the same time, the image of Vladek on the bike further reduces him to character--a kind of distracted historian who lacks the requisite artistic capability to see the significance and resonance of his story. Vladek is not artist or story-teller, he is merely a survivor--his experiences reduced to the raw material for an aesthetic experience. Unlike Spiegelman who can go in and out of the past--visiting his father as he pleases, returning home to his wife--Vladek is stuck in the past, destined to relive his memories. The wheel of time is moving forward, but Vladek is not going anywhere with it. The image of Vladek on the bike complicates the reader's reception of his narrative and at the same time highlights the artifice involved in reassembling Vladek's narrative; without Spiegelman's aesthetic skills, the story would read like any other survivor tale spinning its wheels and going nowhere.

This leads us back to where we came in. Do the images in Maus add or detract from the text? The answer is they do both, and they do both in a way that demands close reading and scrutiny for multiple meanings. The tendency to over-simplify the reading of graphic narrative is a tendency Spiegelman exploits to pressure our understanding and reception of a historical event kept alive in the stories of its few remaining survivors.

#13 No Capes

admin — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 08:25:42 +0000

The notion that an ordinary person could become a super hero is an example of what the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would call “the imaginary.” That is, it is a fantasy of stepping out of the symbolic order to exercise mastery over the world--the fantasy of becoming a god-like figure in other words. In Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, the imaginary is a realm of violence, largely because someone always stands in the way of one’s assumption of full power: see the Nazis' Third Reich fantasy depending on the extermination of the Jews, or the interference of the “Indians” in the establishment of a New Canaan in America. In superhero graphic narratives, the violent nature of the imaginary is allayed by the superhero’s employing that violence against villainy. The violence of the superheroes is legitimated by the fact that they use their powers for good, not to attain tyrannical control over the world. The contemporary re-visions of the super hero--Watchmen, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns--offer a gimlet-eyed view of this fantasy, returning the superhero to the symbolic order, re-establishing the “subjectification” of the superhero. It is as if reality is clawing the superhero back into its domain. In fact, though, the (re)subjectification of the superhero has been part of the story from the beginning. There is always an Achilles heel--kryptonite, for instance--that acts as a brake on the super hero’s power. As everyone knows, the problem with being all-powerful is that it doesn’t make for much of a story. What does make for a good story, however, is an exploration of the limits of the imaginary register. To what extent can a hero can be “super” before disappearing in a puff of smoke--becoming completely implausible even to the most willing suspender of disbelief, the comic book reader. The integration of the world of superhero comics into Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude, a conventional (i.e. non-graphic) novel, illuminates just how elastic these limits can be. Dylan Ebdus, the protagonist of the novel, designs a suit and invents a character--Aeroman--who flies. In the novel’s most painful moment, the 13-year-old Dylan dresses in the suit to impress his first love, Heather. The scene is a perfect example of the imaginary hitting the wall of reality. Nevertheless, in the novel, the wearer of the suit and the bearer of the special ring flies. We keep waiting for the illusion to break, but it doesn’t. Whatever it is flying requires--balance, poise, unhesitation, an organ for sensing air waves--he’s apparently got. His swoop begins just below the garage’s second story, two balled fists leading the charge as he curves from the expected collision with the pavement, first falling aslant, then unmistakably horizontal. (205) The effect is quite the opposite of reading a superhero comic book, where we are in a receptive frame of mind regarding what the human or superhuman individual is capable of. In Fortress of Solitude we wait for reality to assert itself and when it doesn’t, our heads spin. The flipside of this relationship between reality and the imaginary can be seen in Brad Bird’s animated film, The Incredibles, not only in the Incredible family’s difficulties in adjusting to suburban living after “supers” have been prohibited by law from exercising their powers, but also in the technical details involved in designing a new costume for Mr Incredible’s re-emergence. Edna Mode, the designer, pronounces “No Capes!” and goes into an account of various superheros coming a cropper because they got their capes snagged on something or other. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M68ndaZSKa8 This intrusion of a kind of reality principle into the imaginary realm captures our relationship to that realm, where our willing suspension of disbelief negotiates with our concept of plausibility. We can never finally escape our subjectification to the symbolic order and its rules, not even in comic books. In non-superhero graphic narratives, the concept of the imaginary manifests itself as a desire to fill a lack, to become complete. In Asterios Polyp that means Asterios’ longing for his still-born twin Ignazio. In Ghost World it means the possibility of re-inventing oneself--escaping this world and finding another one that allows full access to the personality one wishes. Ghost World is a particularly good example because of it’s continued leaning towards a world elsewhere because “this” world is too limiting, puts too much of a bar on subjectivity. The point here is that fulfillment is always over the horizon, never immediately possible. In spite of the fact that the superhero graphic narrative appears to offer access to the imaginary wholeness and power that obviously fuels much of the human imagination, the genie keeps having to be put back in the bottle. The apparent access to power rarely brings satisfaction; rather it comes with an attendant anxiety. As Umberto Eco is fond of saying, Superman never gets to save the world; rather, he’s stuck with the menial task of fighting petty crime. In fact these irritants that limit the full expression of “superiority” turn out to be saving graces. However much we might fantasize about flying, superhuman strength, we really want to stay on this side of the the symbolic order. In the end, we need to know that the imaginary is just that. Superhero graphic narratives pose the question of “what if” we could bypass all these limitations, only to reinforce them. In doing so they send us back to the realm of serious literature, which is all about what it means to be subjectified within the symbolic order.

#14 The Apocalypse and the Graphic Narrative

admin — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 02:49:59 +0000

One of the most common themes in graphic narratives is the apocalypse. Usually associated with some sort of impending doom, narratives that deal with an impending apocalypse, or narratives that create an apocalyptic possibility, frequent our literature. Nearly always, the central characters in Western fiction, particularly modern English literature, are facing some kind of apocalyptic event that drives their narrative. How these characters deal with the apocalyptic threat--or it metaphoric equivalent--is one of the most central story-lines in modern literature. Despite its entrenchment in the prophecies of doom, the apocalyptic moment can signal a rebirth or renewal; it's not all bad. Often, the apocalyptic moment sets off the narrative, creating the environment for character and story to develop. Asterios Polyp's apartment burning down sets the story-line in motion and creates the context for the graphic novel. In a wonderful twist to the apocalyptic theme, the fiery decent of a renegade earth-destroying asteroid suggests Asterios' new-found emotional clarity set in motion by the novel's first house-burning apocalypse will end with the novel's final, real, apocalypse. Likewise, Superman's residency on earth as a moral crusader against petty criminals and dimensional time-travelers is set in motion by the apocalyptic fate of Krypton. Suffice to say, not all apocalyptic moments or threats necessarily mean the end; they can also signal enlightenment, fortitude and renewal. Frank Kermode, in his book The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, argues that modern literature's obsession with apocalyptic themes that are both positive and negative has led to the deployment of a type of character who is always what Kermode calls "in the middest." Characters are stuck in a kind of limbo where they fail to develop or, fail to act in a way that represents some kind of moral lesson or guidance. In short, the characters do not develop, but rather represent the painstaking minutiae that are the moments between an apocalypse that represents rebirth--the promise of emotional, physical, and intellectual enlightenment--and the apocalypse that represents the end--the promise of an end to emotional, physical, and intellectual pain. Here’s what Kermode writes to help explain his concept of the apocalypse in modern literature: "Men, like poets, rush 'into the middest,' in medias res, when they are born; they also die in medias rebus, and to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems. The End they imagine will reflect their irreducibly intermediary preoccupations. They fear it, and as far as we can see have always done so; the End is a figure for their own deaths" (Kermode 7). What Kermode’s getting at here is that we rely on our sense of what we are doing in life to understand what our deaths will be like. In other words, we might die working, or skiing, but not because we were zapped by an Alien's death-ray, no matter how cool that might be. We also, argues Kermode, tend to construct our origins and endings--make-up what makes us up and fantasize about how it will end. Given this set of interpretive and creative circumstances, Kermode concludes that "Ideally, it [life, narrative, character] is a wholly concordant structure, the end is in harmony with the beginning, the middle with the beginning and end" (Kermode 6). In short, we always interpret things--from comic books to our lives--as having a concordant and complete structure; the wrath from the sky that begins Asterios Polyp reappears at the end of the novel providing a nice continuity to the events of the story and the journey Asterios undertakes. Being stuck in the middle is a peculiar condition of modern life and it is nowhere represented better than in the characters who appear in graphic narratives. The vast majority of the characters in graphic narratives--Jimmy Corrigan, Vladek, Asterios, Bruce Bechdel, even Superman and Batman--are in the process of reconstructing a past or envisioning a more promising future. These quests for understanding and identity often guide the process through which the story develops and, in the case of the images, the kind of concordance the images can provide. In spite of its tendencies toward innovative story-lines and cutting-edge subjects, the graphic narrative relies on the kind of “fictive concords” Kermode identifies. On the one hand, a comic book like Batman always begins in medias res, taking up a narrative long begun and reconstructing origins as it goes along. On the other hand, a more serious graphic narrative such as Maus, also enters into a long-standing narrative surrounding memory, memoir, and history. In both cases, an apocalyptic moment launches or sustains the narrative. At the same time, the imagery--Batman always looks like Batman / Vladek is always on his "stationary" bike--gives the narrative a “concordant structure” that anchors the process toward enlightenment, or the continuing futility of coming to terms with the emotional scars that govern our identity and actions. In The Incredibles, Edna's warning that there are to be “no capes!” relies on the threat of a “cape apocalypse” for its resonance. However, that same apocalyptic threat also brings about a rebirth and breath of originality in her suit design. The apocalypse both constructs the beginning--the capes that were--and opens the door for the future--the capes that are no more. The stories about the capes--and the images of them—provide continuity in an often seemingly discontinuous medium.

#15 Apocalypse and the Graphic Narrative Part 2: Ground Zero

admin — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 03:32:59 +0000

Speaking of apocalypse, what if David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp allegorizes the events of the morning of September 11, 2001 in New York City? The text provides a fair amount of evidence for the idea: Asterios, with his “double” obsession enthuses about the architecture of the Twin Towers; when Asterios’ building is struck by lightning and burns, Asterios says to himself, “not again”; whenever Asterios has a fantasy/dream sequence about his still-born twin brother Ignazio, a plane appears on the horizon; and a huge crater occupies the very centre of this unpaginated volume. If this is the case, Asterios’ personal apocalypse of jetisonning his past life and starting over at “ground zero,” is woven into an American national apocalypse. But “woven into” is the wrong metaphor, perhaps. Rather, the American apocalypse is something that we see out of the corner of our eye as we read Asterios’ story, except when it is staring us right in the face in the middle of the text.

Students ask legitimate questions about the indirectness of this kind of allegory. If a person wanted to write a book about 9/11 why wouldn’t he or she make it plain? Why all the hints and innuendo? Why is the plane off on the horizon and not smashing into a tower? It’s not as if the image of a plane crashing into one of the towers is unrepresentable. There is a comic book version of the 9/11 Report after all. And if the book is an allegory, it isn’t symmetrical. In the story of the Polyp twins, one dies at birth and the other lives, at least until moments after the conclusion of the text when a meteor smashes into him. Reading Asterios Polyp isomorphically, as a map of 9/11, proves to fraught with problems. And yet we cannot escape some sort of equation between this story of an architect whose buildings never get built and the infamous destruction of the World Trade center.

Allegory is a funny business. It is difficult to say why it re-routes what it is about through some other story like a literary version of Freud’s dream work, condensing and displacing traumatic instances. Why bother creating an equation between what happens in the text and some external event? And once we “get” the allegory–”Oh, this is about 9/11”–then what? Does the story of Asterios Polyp disappear in a puff of smoke? Is 9/11 in any way better understood by being put through this process? It may be that allegory itself is apocalyptic, dependent on veiling and unveiling the truth, showing and hiding in such a way as to make readers conspiracy theorists, who gasp when they see the “hidden” pattern but don’t pause to think that the pattern was never really that hidden, and ultimately could have been stated forthrightly in the first place. The better novels of Thomas Pynchon play this game, but the ultimate exponent of it is Melville’s Moby-Dick, with its constant veiling and unveiling of the whale. Asterios Polyp, then, participates in a strong tradition of American literature. And this tradition participates in the way The United States constructs itself as an imagined community, both allegorical and apocalyptic: a new world; a new Canaan; the last, best hope of mankind. Mazzucchelli’s story both mimics and destabilizes this construction. Asterios Polyp lingers on failures of the American idea. For instance, in a dream/fantasy sequence, Asterios visits the Vietnam Memorial and finds the name of his brother Ignazio on the wall. In Apogee, on July 4, 2000, while they watch the town Independence Day parade, Ursula Major regales Asterios with the history of American Indians and the way their land was taken from them and their culture destroyed. This Independence Day was, of course, the last one before 9/11. When Asterios heads off to Apogee with only the clothes on his back, a Zippo lighter, a watch, and a Swiss Army knife, he strips himself down. He gives up architecture and becomes an auto mechanic. This new beginning is a journey into humility that opposes power, abstraction and arrogance. Asterios gives up one great American myth for another: the fantasy of a return to simplicity, where ordinary people (auto mechanics) rather than elite specialists (architects) hold the key to to the ideal life. Nevertheless, this notion of striving for humility after a disaster has a kind of allegorical force. Every apocalyptic moment is an opportunity to rethink the world and one’s place in it. Every allegory, like the simplest animal fable, is a chance to re-evaluate morals and values.

#16 Louis Riel and The Optics of History

admin — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 12:10:06 +0000

In a review of Chester Brown's Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography, the Globe and Mail argues that the book "is comics history in the making, and with it, history never looked so good." How things look is an important part of the historical record; optics are everything, and Brown's novel gives us plenty of optics to get into. The comic treads ground covered by the stylistic cues we have been discussing that mark memoir along with the narrative structure and biographical back-story that defines the superhero genre. Riel--as he is portrayed by Brown--works on the reader by nesting in the space between the superhero and what we might call the ordinary--a tight space on a good day, just ask Clark when he squeezes into the phone booth to change. The superhero Riel is at once the mythological figure of Canadian history whose heroic, but failed, attempts to lead his people to salvation are the stuff of every Canadian history book; and the chiseled, broad-shouldered, intellectual and political savant who deftly toils against greater powers of evil. Of course, a key part of this interpretation of Riel relies on a reading of Brown's drawing, which is stark, clean-lined, and crisp when it concerns Riel and his Metis compatriots, but mocking, skewed, and disingenuous when representing English figures such as John A. McDonald and his elongated schnozzola. Elements of the ordinary, however, frequent the novel. Riel is often let down and betrayed by others, there are few whom he can trust, and he is ultimately faced with a foe who is stronger. Riel is not after-all created by freak scientific accident or a displaced soul possessing extraordinary power sent from another planet to help hapless Red Riverians; he is a "half-breed" like the others. An alien among aliens; an ordinary man among ordinary men. In the beginning, his one power is that he speaks English.

Of course, as it turns out, this power of speech is what sends him down the superheroic and mythological path. Not coincidentally, the characteristics of bilingualism, the ability to occupy both sides of the divide, is akin to the dual identities of the superhero: both mild-mannered and man of steel; unassuming Clark Kent and man in blue tights. When Riel speaks English in the novel, he is clearly wearing his blue tights. Brown's decision to depict Riel speaking English by dropping all his Hs accentuates the fact that Riel is not perfectly bilingual, but like all of us, marked by his accent. Though he may look like a white man, he does not talk like one.

Besides having Riel drop all his Hs, Brown also skirts the language barrier that would hinder an understanding of Riel's words amongst English audiences by having Riel's French rendered into English in between <>. By erasing Riel's original French language, Brown, perhaps unwittingly and in good faith, participates in exactly the kind of cultural and political erasure that gives rise to Riel's rebellion. Moreover, Riel's awkward English in the book evens the score for McDonald's nose, giving Riel a flaw instantly recognizable to any English speaker. In closing, one of the most important facets of Riel's history, and the graphic narrative itself, is that it ends. While Riel may embody the characteristics of a superhero, he is nonetheless intensely mortal--an ordinary individual. His death serves to illustrate Umberto Eco's point about the superhero's "consumability." Arguing that superheroes cannot interact with big, moral, real-world problems--they have to stick to petty crimes and psychos in make-up--Eco makes a convincing case for the reader's inability to "consume" the superhero; the superhero never dies because s/he never actually participates in the real world. If Superman were actually to tackle poverty and hunger, he would ultimately become all too real and his limits all too evident. As if to further Eco's reading, Riel is a superheroic figure who has already been consumed because he belongs to the historical record and his mythology is established through the numerous other re-tellings of his story. Like Superman and the ordinary individual, Riel both lives out the same narrative sequence over and over again, and dies. Unlike our supposed repressed desire to be Superman, by shedding our work-a-day clothing in favour of a blue suit and cape, we do not want to see Riel as a figure of escape. Riel meets his fate and is punished, again and again as the story is re-told. Just like ordinary people who act out, Riel knows that there are consequences to bear; no last minute escape while the villain is "monologuing."

That Brown knocks off the final frame of the book forces us to ask "what's in a frame," and what historical perspective is Brown asserting by suggesting a parallel between the end of Riel's life and the abruptly terminated formal structure of the page? History and biography are all about making the subject look good. Brown's portrayal of Riel suggests that "optics are important," in culture, in politics, in history, in story, and in the graphic narrative. Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography seems to take advantage of the graphic medium to tell a story that forces us to rethink how the mythological, superheroic, and the individual are connected to the optics of historiography.

#17 Louis Riel and Religious Mysticism

admin — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 06:29:24 +0000

In Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography Chester Brown treats his subject not just as a political martyr but as an unconventional religious one, whose spirituality dances with mental illness. Riel renounces Catholicism for a private mysticism, as if he were the founder of a new religion.The cover picture of Lous Riel: a Comic Strip Biography features Riel on a mountain top, like Moses waiting for God's word. But inside the volume we see a difficult character to judge because of the way Riel's public political activism intersects with his seemingly private religious feeling. So the reader is left wondering: Is Riel a saint? A lunatic? Or just a political figurehead? The difficulty in answering these questions is what makes Brown’s graphic narrative interesting. Brown doesn’t simply serve Riel up as an uncomplicated cultural hero. Rather, he presents him as a tormented soul who cannot figure out who he is or what he is supposed to mean. The arc of the story shows Riel increasingly having less interest in the political aspects of the Metis rebellion as he becomes more self-involved, mystical, and, perhaps, crazy. He still believes in his cause, but he seems not as willing to pursue military and political ends. Furthermore, he has had a spell in the asylum, having been committed for megalomania. We might think of megalomania as a synonym for “power mad,” but that is not quite it. Rather, he believes above all that he is right. Riel has the disease of religious and political true believers. For a mental illness, it's pretty heroic.

The framing of Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography belies any craziness or mysticism. In fact, it suggests order and rationality. Every page contains six frames: three rows of two, as rigidly ordered as the plots of land that the Canadian government imposes on the Metis. The framing suggests containment. Indeed, compared to something like David Mazzuchelli’s Asterios Polyp which everywhere confounds comic book conventionality, Brown’s volume is indeed a “comic strip,” sequential, ordered, almost like a filmstrip in its unfolding.

This disconnect between the form of the graphic narrative and its subject ironically illustrates the fact that Riel cannot be contained. There is something about him that escapes framing, even though he is continually “framed” in the sense that he is set up, falsely accused. In fact we can see the format of the “comic-strip” as prison bars. When Riel is tried and the background is solid black, the entrapment of the frames becomes obvious.

As the narrative approaches its conclusion, form and subject become more and more divergent. Riel becomes difficult to comprehend. As his brothers in arms defend themselves against the Canadians by shooting, Riel muses on the failures of the Church. He doesn’t shoot; he just sits there. He has gone from being an iconic representative of his people to a someone who seems more like a solipsist.

As biography, Louis Riel is ironic. Rather than unfold Riel or reveal him, Brown shuts him up, making him more rather than less opaque.

#18 Louis Riel's Legacy

admin — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 16:40:54 +0000

My colleagues have dealt effectively with some of the essential issues in Chester Brown's Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography*. In tackling the ideas of super heroism, bilingualism, cultural erasure, mortality, sainthood, mysticism, irony, and framing, they've given two succinct yet complex examinations of what makes Louis Riel such a worthwhile read. For my part, I'd like to focus primarily on a close reading of the text's epilogue: a single, five-panel page that picks up the narrative after the death of Riel. In the podcast, I somewhat flippantly framed this conclusion as an example of “Everything Was Terrible, and Then They Died,” which is the unofficial theme of every Canadian Literature course I’ve ever taught. But it is desperately true in this text. Not only, as the previous blog posts address, does our superhero die (the nerve!), but his legacy is left, at the end of this narrative, completely frustrated. In the final five panels, we are told that 24 men who fought with the Métis were jailed and that many more fled to the States until an amnesty was declared; that Gabriel Dumont’s wife died and that he joined the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show; that Riel’s wife lost an infant child, then died herself, and then Riel’s other two children died, too; that Sir John A. MacDonald lived to a healthy old age and was Prime Minister forever; and that George Stephen, president of the CPR, became one of the richest men in the world and lived to be 92.

In other words: Métis jailed, exiled, dead; Riel line obliterated; MacDonald won; and Stephen won even more. Everything was terrible, and then they did really die. Except the bad guys, who made out awesome. Why this epilogue, though? Because it's not just about representation of truth or history, as this isn’t where Riel’s story or the Riel-inspired Métis story ends. A cheerier epilogue, one involving the Métis cultural renaissance and Riel’s role in it as a folk hero, is possible here. But Brown instead makes a choice to tell a very pessimistic version of Riel’s legacy in this epilogue, effectively destroying it. There is no glimmer of hope and no opening for a sequel. The camera does not pan to a baby Riel, swaddled in a basket, offering the promise of future rebellions to come. Riel fails as a superhero in this narrative not just because he dies, but because he resists resurrection. In the end, he’s just a man -- a dead one. Ultimately, this epilogue underscores Brown’s ambivalence about Riel. Riel gets deconstructed, over the course of the narrative, from heroic figure (albeit reluctant) to ambiguously crazy (should we discount him or not?) to just broken. A different story about Riel would have ended differently, with a more uplifting and hopeful epilogue. But this is, I think, at its core a story about tipping points and breaking points. Brown is not just exploring Riel-the-character or Canadian identity (though he does do both very well); he’s also examining motivation and destruction. What does it take for Riel to get involved, even when he really doesn’t seem to want to? And what moves Riel from defending his culture and faith to rising up against the church he swore to protect? The outspoken man from the beginning of the narrative is so easily and readily silenced at the end -- both literally and immediately, by his priest, and for all of history, by death, time, and Brown’s chosen focus. How he moves through this journey is at the heart of Brown’s exploration. -- *: This FOOTNOTE is a place to observe that the other place I have seen this terminology is Ice Haven by Daniel Clowes, which he also terms a “comic-strip novel.” This is an observation largely apropos of nothing, but I am nerdily interested in the naming of graphic narratives. Is it okay to say comic book? What if it’s not a novel, but it is graphic? /nerdalert

#19 Advertising Narratives

admin — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 05:43:03 +0000

Thus far in this space, we have restricted ourselves to the discussion of what specific texts represent or themes that those texts foreground. We've discussed how cultural moments and movements intersect with the content of graphic narratives and tried to situate the texts within their proper socio-historical context. In this post, the focus is going to shift slightly, into the margins: the spaces around the comic book. Namely, advertising.

The central question being posed here is whether or not advertising plays a part in the narrative sequence of the comic book. In other words, we might look at how the advertisements respond to, or mimic, the storyline. Do the advertisements address themes running through the comic book? And finally, how do the images in advertisements reflect the images put forward in the comic's ongoing sequence of images.

For now, let's stick with an early comic book: Spiderman's first solo appearance in a comic book. The narrative is well known: bitten by a radio-active spider, orphaned teenager Peter Parker searches for a way out of an uncomfortable adolescence using his newfound powers. In the process of understanding his role, Parker makes a decision not to act, inadvertently leading to the death of his Uncle Ben, leaving Parker as the sole breadwinner for himself and his Aunt May. At first glance, Spiderman appears to be innovative because it represents a "real" teenager with "real" problems. Gone is the one-dimensional moral clarity of Batman or Superman, replaced with the confused emerging personality of a persecuted teenager. Peter Parker, for all his young years, has adult problems that are beyond the comprehension of archetypal superheroes; Parker needs a job, he needs money, and he needs a girl. Here's where the advertisements come in. Everything Parker needs, the ads offer. Advertisements in the comic book do not sell what we might assume are typical 1950s teenage amusements--sporting goods, music, bubble gum, and hair care products. Instead, they sell muscles (to get the girls), lessons on refrigeration and air conditioning repair (to get the job and the money). In short, the advertisements play off all the insecurities Parker has about his daily life and his self image. The body builder selling the "secrets of attracting girls" even borrows the superhero trope, calling himself Mike Marvel so as to better represent the possibilities for those who buy the body image he's selling. At the same time, the advertisements for all their address to teenage angst, also seem to be aimed at adults, a supposition further supported by the fact that the ads tend to represent adults in the drawings. The advertisements then tell us something about the socio-cultural context of the comic book: clearly, the advertisers knew that kids weren't the only ones reading Spiderman. Indeed, most of the advertisements call out for "Men" and (or in preference to) "boys." Often, the advertisements seem to answer the siren call of the narrative. In the Spiderman comic mentioned above, there are some panels in which the narrative arc is dealing with Parker's desperate need for money. The advertisement which follows the cliff-hanging moment in the narrative arc is for a money-making opportunity--one which is predicated on Parker's own dilemma: not knowing how to get started.

What's even more interesting about the lead-in to the advertisement is how Parker foregrounds his thoughts by questioning the validity of other superhero narratives where money doesn't seem to be a problem. Parker's self-examination, and his socio-cultural awareness of superheroes, provide ample basis for an advertisement "reality check" promising quick fixes. Not by accident, Parker's own troubles are soon fortuitously resolved and the advertisement's promises confirmed by the experiences of our "real-world" teenager's ability to land a job working for the man who hates his alter-ego most.

The advertisements in early comic books are eclectic and diverse. They represent the fishy--like pet seahorses and dubious coinage schemes (characteristic of the best super-villains)--and the obvious--like drawing classes so one can become a great artist (not a comic book artist mind you). In every way, these advertisements reflect the medium and deserve our attention for what they tell us about the reception and construction of the accompanying graphic narratives.

#20 Everyday Enemies and the Ordinary World in Early Spiderman

admin — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 19:04:43 +0000

Villainy in the early Spiderman is a double phenomenon, as the quotidian nemeses of Spiderman and Peter Parker, who appear in every issue, contrast with the “super” villains, who are specific to particular issues, though they frequently make repeat appearances. This contrast testifies to the fact that Spiderman, and perhaps every super hero comic, works in two registers that overlap each other but are in fact quite distinct. The frequent split-face frames in which half the face is Peter Parker’s face and the other half is Spiderman’s mask signal the double world of the comic: the world of the “symbolic order” and the world of the “imaginary”. In the world of the symbolic order all normal social rules apply; teenagers must go to high-school and take their place in the gendered pecking order. The world of the imaginary, however, is one where radioactive spider bites allow a hero to swing from building to building with the help of a web shooter and confront villains as outlandishly origined and costumed as he is. The everyday enemies triangulate with Peter Parker and Spiderman in such a way that demonstrates the separation of worlds. J Jonah Jameson has a near hysterical hatred of Spiderman and yet he employs Peter Parker at The Daily Bugle as a photographer. Readers get a taste of dramatic irony in our knowledge that Parker and Spiderman are the same person; we see the relationship between worlds that Jameson does not. For Jameson, the world of the imaginary that contains Spiderman is always “out there” as Spiderman eludes all his efforts to stamp him out. No matter what good Spiderman achieves, even when he saves Jameson’s astronaut son in issue #2, Jameson persists in his hatred. Just as Spiderman is a typical teenager, Jameson is a standard middle-aged father figure as he might appear to teenage eyes: irrationally critical, impossible to satisfy, and full of prejudice. What we have here may be an early 60s prototype of “The Man,” who later in the decade will represent everything retrograde in Amercian society. For the moment, however, Jameson is an enemy of the whole concept of the super hero. Flash Thompson, meanwhile, is the sign of all that is oppressive about Peter Parker’s teenagehood, especially the fact that he must keep his super powers secret. Thompson bullies Parker relentlessly and stereotypically, reminding us of how much Parker represents the desire of the typical comic book reader, the desire of the “intellectual” bookworm to become “physical” hero. And yet, Thompson is smitten with Spiderman, always willing to defend him against Jameson’s suggestions in The Bugle. Like Jameson, Thompson points to the separation of symbolic and imaginary worlds, when Peter Parker sets him up to be Spiderman’s alter ego in issue #8. After all, it’s more likely that the athletic, muscular Thompson be Spiderman than the four-eyed science geek. Indeed, when Dr Octopus unmasks Spiderman to reveal Peter Parker in issue #12, no one believes the revelation. Parker must have been “dressing up” as Spiderman. The inhabitants of the symbolic order will not permit the imaginary world of the super hero to link up with it in this way. Again, Spiderman must exist beyond the symbolic order. As simplistic as early Spiderman is, it carefully keeps the imaginary world distinct from everyday reality, allowing our minds to function in two perceptual frameworks that the destiny of super hero comics, in the form of Watchmen, will asymptotically try to bring together.

#21 Shifting Agencies: Spider-Man’s Contribution to the Silver Age of Superhero Comics

admin — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 01:23:30 +0000

While Spider-man is now a household name, few recognize what a significant upset he was to the comics industry during the early 1960s – the immediate popularity of his character signified a shift in the way comics would be thought of in terms of their demographics and realized what the industry had been attempting to achieve for decades prior: a readership who identified with the protagonist. Superhero comics, at their core, are about establishing fictional agency over events that are outside of one’s control – the Golden Age of comics, generally acknowledged to have started with Action Comics #1 in 1938, saw heroes battling the forces of social oppression through archetypal figures of organized crime in often nameless mob leaders, advancing technologies in mad scientists, and later ideologically though the key figures of the Second World War as openly displayed in Captain America knocking out Hitler, Batman passing needed weapons to soldiers or, as the cover of Action Comics #58 shows, Superman hand printing posters which told America that “Superman says you can slap a Jap with war bonds and stamps.” These figures of the Golden age addressed extremely varied but pressing social and ideological concerns of their day (often in problematic ways), but they were consistent in at least one aspect: they presented predominantly adult heroes who were confident and secure, dealing with the metonymic representations of social ills handily and definitively. DC Comics dominated the marketplace, and while there were variations in costumes and powers, that the hero was an adult remained a constant for decades; children and teen characters of the Golden Age, when appearing at all, were given subordinate positions, as seen most famously in Batman’s Robin and Captain America’s Bucky. As comics during this era were intended predominantly for children and adolescents, some have argued that the solely adult hero was a product of poor marketing; others have claimed that superhero comics were mired in the traditions of the dimestore novels that preceded them, refusing to acknowledge that the new medium for these stories demanded a different approach in their telling. What is more likely is that these comics were being marketed to the adults who ultimately would purchase them for their children, on topics that spoke to those with buying power and addressing water-cooler concerns of the day. What concerned this audience were the larger social and political issues of the day. When Spider-man erupted in 1962, his presence was a dramatic shift away from these ideological and social interests to focus more squarely on the teenager and the plight of the individual – a protagonist who was, for the first time, reflective of the actual age of superhero comics’ readers. Stan Lee’s vision for Spider-man in this regard was unwavering – he demanded, to the protests of his senior editor, that his hero be an unexceptional teen and not, as were the common tropes, a billionaire, an alien or a trained soldier. Lee prognosticated what few others realized about superhero comics at the time: those who are attracted to the agency that superhero comics promote are drawn to it in more practical, tangible ways than through ideologically-based conflicts. Villains such as the mad doctor Hugo Strange, Hitler’s protégé Red Skull or billionaire madman Lex Luthor, while compelling, are hardly accessible to the adolescent (or even truly the adult) reader – while one can celebrate in the chosen hero’s triumph over the capitalistic power of Luthor or the fascism of Red Skull, these victories do not provide entry in such a way as to allow readers to identify with the application of this agency in their own lives, again being the cornerstone of the superhero genre as a whole. Tellingly, Spider-man’s introduction prompted a title change from Amazing Adult Fantasy to Amazing Fantasy, with his first appearance being in issue #15. Though the cover addressed the trope of the adult archetypal hero, being arguably a swipe of Batman’s first appearance in Detective Comics #27, and was again marketed to the parent who had purchasing power, the content was radically different from what the industry had seen to this point. Peter Parker was a bullied teenager, orphaned and in the care of an elderly aunt and uncle, and required tangible control over his personal circumstances in a way that was both pointed and realistic – indeed, his first act on receiving his powers from a radioactive spider bite was to enter a wrestling contest in pursuit of a cash prize. Unlike his predecessors, Spider-man does not live in a world of moral binaries, and while standing for good, his reaction is not that of a cultural signifier but of an individual youth. This shift in how comics understood the demands of its readership – agency of the individual, not of society on the whole – is now a common facet of the comics industry. Amazing Fantasy #15, though at first considered a long shot, was Marvel’s best selling single issue to that point in the company’s history and prompted the introduction of more teenage characters who, though imbued with various powers, all had personal problems as well that were addressed in the background of super-villain battles. The X-Men, the first teenaged team, were launched late in the year following Spider-man’s introduction and became another highly successful title for the company. DC comics was slower to follow suit, being placed in the problematic position of having long-established adult characters – they opted for slapstick situations and storylines during the Silver Age involving these household names, and it is likely because of this ineffective approach at garnering teenage readers that Marvel, with its growing host of new, adolescent characters who could be more easily identified with, quickly gained market dominance. By the advent of Spider-man, DC’s Superman and Batman were already cultural memes and there was little that could be done to reconcile this fact with the shifting market. The introduction of Spider-man to the world of comics represented a paradigm shift in the way that the superhero was constructed – his success meant the creation of characters who were more easily identified with, who had relatable problems and who had struggles of conscience in dealing with their real life concerns. Prior to Spider-man, agency was left in the capable hands of the superhero who would right wrongs and provide confidence in the reader that justice would be served on a larger scale – Spider-man, however, shifted this perspective to show that agency lies more potently within the individual, that anyone - regardless of circumstances - can become a hero in his or her own life, and cautioned us that with this “great power comes great responsibility.”

#22 Spider-Man: The Spaces Between

admin — Fri, 06 May 2011 05:23:54 +0000

Is there anything more tantalizing to the obnoxious literary scholar than the modest hyphen? There it sits, indicating connectedness and yet emphasizing separateness. Everybody* loves to debate the placement of hyphens in a literary text, and here we have one right in our protagonist’s name. Spider-Man. Not Phil Spiderman, as Chandler Bing once joked, but Spider-Man. With this moniker, Peter Parker (occasionally Palmer) simultaneously connects his humanity to his acquired powers and distances himself from them. He is a Spider-Man in a way that allows him to retain his personhood and not fully become a spider the way, say, the Vulture is not Vulture-Man but rather wholly and completely Vulture. Vulture, as a super-villain, does not need to retain his humanity in quite the same way.

In fact, Spider-Man works hard to keep his identities separate, even within himself:

Which is not to say that this entire post is going to be about hyphens. But noticing the hyphen did get me interested in the spaces between in these early issues of The Amazing Spider-Man: the silences, blank spaces, missing pieces, and need for space articulated throughout the comic. For example, in the very early issues, much of the action actually happens during the ad breaks. In Amazing Spider-Man #1, for example, he repairs the capsule during a larger silence; we don’t actually see the repair, only the success: Before the ad for “How to Draw Anything!”:

And after:

This happens again in the next issue; fighting Vulture, Spider-Man finds himself inside a water tank. He escapes, of course, but the mechanism of the escape again happens in the liminal space between the panels (and again, during an ad break) and in a space the reader is simply not privy to. Instead we are told what will happen, and then that it has happened. We don’t see the process. Before the ad for “How to Fight Anything!”:

And after:

There are lots of potential explanations for this, primary among them likely the fact that a youthful imagination can probably conjure up more glory in the empty space than Steve Ditko (or anyone else) can possibly draw. These empty spaces allow room for imagination that we don’t always associate with graphic novels and comics, which are usually seen as a show-and-tell medium. It’s also striking that this happens through an ad break -- the advertisements don’t pause the action! Spider-Man is still Spider-Manning while you’re poring over ads for Saturday Shoe Salesmanship. Even in contemporary “reality” TV, advertisements almost always pause the action. This is something different, and in an interesting way it almost encourages a reader to hurry past the advertisements lest he or she miss the action. I find this particularly interesting when contrasted with scenes where no silence is offered: the fight scenes. Spider-Man obsessively narrates the fights in a way that allows no room for alternate readings of his conquests. OH NOES I AM AGAINST THE WALL IN CASE YOU COULD NOT TELL FROM THE ACCOMPANYING DRAWING:

One would think this volume of narration would slow down the fight scenes, though it doesn’t seem to have this effect. It does seem to likewise undercut the show-and-tell medium of the comic, however, given that in these scenes the show is rather less important than the incessant telling. There are other essential spaces in the text, too -- not least the spaces Peter Parker must find in which to transition into his Spider-Man identity.

Parker goes from being a young man effectively forced into solitude by school bullies to one who seeks out moments alone in order to achieve true greatness. One of the most interesting debates that emerges through the letters pages is the tension between those fans who want Spider-Man to have a sidekick, partner, or even to join the Fantastic Four, versus those who like that Spider-Man battles through life alone. Parker gains the esteem of his classmates slowly over the series, but by that point his identity as Spider-Man has created an uncrossable chasm between himself and the other teenagers. There are missing pieces in the narrative, too. Like why does J. Jonah Jameson hate Spider-Man so acutely? How old is Betty supposed to be, anyway? These empty space only really come to light when one starts to examine the narrative closely, however. But together, all of these ideas seem to point to the importance of space, absence, and silence in the world of Amazing Spider-Man. --- Apropos of nothing, I was quite struck by the inclusion of full names and addresses on the letters pages. Which generation is it that’s supposed to have a total disregard for privacy, again? And as a further aside, I really enjoyed revisiting Spider-Man’s origins; reading these early comics has almost repaired the damage done to Spider-Man for me in the Civil War Marvel world event (which was awesome in almost every way except for Spidey being such an epic tool). --- * with too much schooling and too much spare time

#23 Spiderman is a Compound Noun

admin — Mon, 16 May 2011 13:15:58 +0000

Reading through both vintage Spiderman comics and the Spider-Man issues that are part of the 2006-07 Civil War series, it strikes me that comics are unique when it comes to providing the well-meaning critic with something to do. With comics, particularly those featuring Superheroes but not exclusively, we are always already and simultaneously reading the text through comic's histories and ignoring those same histories to make way for the new.

When we first meet him, Spiderman is a compound noun, a single word. His character development is sloppy, the context all over the place, and the storylines--one featuring the aged, pot-bellied "Vulture" as formidable villain--are not yet the pinnacle of the series, but he is as complete as he will ever be--web-slinging, sticky-fingered, red, blue, slant-eyed costume with webbing. It's all there, right at the beginning.

When we see him in the Civil War series, Spider-Man--and by extension Peter Parker--are quite different characters. In fact, gone is the spindly, spectacled science-geek, with the crew-cut and awkward sport coat; in his place we have the beautifully coiffed, physically magnificent, and supermodel-married, experienced superhero--the envy of all who toil below him. In short, Spider-Man, like his hyphen suggests is more Man than he ever was, but the costume remains (at least for the reveal).

The central point here is that, despite the spaces joined by his hyphenated nom-de-plume, we are looking at Spiderman as though he were a compound noun. The adjective--a man who is "spiderish" indicated by the hyphenation--is long gone, and it in its place is a "person / place / or thing" that has a rich, varied history and an accompanying mythology that stretches some sixty-odd years. We are reading a text--the Spiderman--that can be, and has been, edited over and over again, and by different authors in different styles. Spider-man is made up of a never-ending cycle of revision in which the stability of the character's traits, habits, look, age, emotions, etc., are consistently changing, responding to emerging socio-cultural contexts (such as 9/11 in Civil War), and integrating the shifting paradigms of human relationships over time.

The issue for readers of course is which Spider-man are we reading? Of course, this question leads to many protracted exchanges about the relative value of a particular era or artist, but it also challenges traditional critical approaches. Can we imagine what James Joyce's Ulysses might look like if it were consistently re-written over the last 60 years, and by different authors? Spider-Man, and the genre to which the character belongs, shows its allegiance to the serialized novel of the Victorian era, but at the same time also rhymes with the often multiplied author and subject-matter of the digital; the daily blog, the collaborative, multi-authored environment of the website, even the "reader pages" at the back of vintage Spider-Man comics mimic the "like / dislike" themes and wall-posting methodologies of social media.

In short, Spider-Man is the proverbial #hashtag that trends according to the context in which it finds itself. Our expectations for Peter Parker change, or we ignore the fact that Peter Parker is not who he once was and keep moving. What we don't do is linger over the differences--or inconsistencies--between vintage Spiderman and now Spider-Man, letting them ruin the makings of a good story. Much like life-experiences, we're often drawn to the lure of the new, disregarding the past and descending happily into the maelstrom without accounting for what we already know.

Our Spider-senses tingle, but we don't really check things out and go back to the vintage texts and track the discontinuity. Instead, we revel in the new, modernized storylines, the close-ups of Mary Jane's breasts (one suspects Aunt May is a little leery of them), and the fantastic new costumes, content that this Spider-Man is the same Spiderman we have always known; he has to be. And, in some odd way, he both is the Spiderman we have always known and he is also the Spider-Man we need to know again. In the end, we're shutting down a lot our critical faculties to look at the pictures and read a Spider-Man storyline. We're accepting a lot of shifting representations and ignoring a lot of history, substituting a consistent--if sometimes reinvented--mythology. What we might be giving up is a self-reflective socio-cultural record of what concerns us or even a common artistic take on the human condition. Suffice to say, Spider-Man is also Spiderman. He is both the symbol of our shifting descriptors--the things that help others distinguish us from the everyday--and a compounded history of all the people, places, and things that have intermingled in the web of our Westernized socio-cultural history. "It's Spider-Man," after all. Or is it?

#24 Spider-Man and the Webs of Romance

admin — Tue, 24 May 2011 03:46:58 +0000

So far, my posts on superhero comics have focused on the relationship between alternate worlds, the way the “imaginary” register of the hero, with his or her powers and nemeses, relates to the “symbolic” register of quotidian reality. Superhero comics are often governed by a plausibility principle, the need to explain or justify what happens in the imaginary register to the symbolic register. Early Spider-Man in particular possesses a strong plausibility principle: Peter Parker is a “genuine” teenager with “genuine” teenage problems. He must live in the symbolic register even as he performs heroic feats as Spider-Man in the imaginary one. Sexuality is of course fundamental to the condition of the genuine teenager[1]. In the early Spider-Man, Peter’s problems with sexual relationships invoke further divisions between worlds, specifically, the worlds of work and high school, and by implication, the worlds of adulthood and childhood. The tension between these worlds is just as fraught as that between the world of the superhero and the world of everyday life. Generally speaking, the love interest is a problem for the male superhero because he always faces the question of whether his girlfriend might discover his identity and out him. Furthermore, the hero faces the temptation to reveal himself; after all, the possession of super powers is a powerful secondary sexual characteristic. Because the hero’s alter ego appears to be an unacceptable object choice, the revelation of these powers promises sexual success. Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude offers a comic version of hero’s revelatory dilemma. Dylan Ebdus leaves his home in Brooklyn to spend a summer in Vermont as a "Fresh Air Kid." At the end of the summer, he decides to reveal his “true” identity as the superhero Aeroman to Heather, the daughter of the family he is staying with, a girl with whom he has a budding romantic relationship. The purpose of the revelation is to seal the deal on the relationship. The moment is awkward because in the symbolic order, such a revelation is embarassing; just as Dylan is entering the adult world of sexuality, he exposes the childish world of his imagination (even though he really can fly!). What would be a moment of triumph becomes one of failure because of Dylan’s inability to obey the principle of the separation of worlds. This principle has broken down as superhero comics have tried to engage more with the world of “reality” in more recent years, but in the early Spider-Man, the principle remains firm. Peter Parker cannot reveal himself as Spider-Man to either Liz Allan or Betty Brant, the two women who both provide the love interest and represent the quotidian world where one has no special powers, a world in which one must toil away at work or school just like everyone else. Peter Parker’s love triangle with Betty and Liz, along with his caring for Aunt May and his bullying at the hands of Flash Thompson make up his matrix of reality, the daily concerns that prove that he is an actual person with whom the reader can identify and not just a spider-bitten freak. His circumstances--he must look after his ailing Aunt May--force him into an accelerated transition from the world of childhood into that of adult responsibility. Indeed, “With great power comes great responsibility” might as well be the slogan for being a grown up as well as being a super hero. Meanwhile, Peter’s schoolmates enjoy a carefree teenage life that Liz Allan is fully part of. Initially, she taunts Peter with all the other kids. And because she is Flash Thompson’s girlfriend, she represents the world of social acceptability and the sexual partnering that goes with it, a world from which Peter is excluded because he is a science nerd. He wears big glasses, a yellow waistcoat or sweater vest, and focuses entirely on his studies. But, as he comes to grips with his new powers, Peter begins to gain confidence and attraction in the social world. He begins his transformation in issue #8, in which he has a boxing match with Flash Thompson. Early in the comic, Flash gives Peter a push and breaks his glasses. He never wears them again. His clothes begin to change as well. The yellow sweater vest gives way to a a more neutral colour in issue #9. At the same time, Liz begins to realize the limitations in Flash as an object choice--he is a dumb jock, after all--and becomes interested in Peter, who, without glasses, looks less like a teenaged Clark Kent. Meanwhile, Betty Brant, who is J Jonah Jameson’s secretary, undergoes a transformation from a maternal figure to a potential romantic partner for Peter. As her hair changes from curly perm to a younger-looking bob, we find that she too is of high school age and that she has had to leave school and enter the work force because of her brother’s gambling debts. Her entry into the world of responsibility echoes Peter’s, but she has been more severely split from the high school world. So it is not surprising that she is jealous of Liz Allan, who threatens to pull Peter back to the world she has been shut out of.

When Betty gets jealous of Liz, it's a sign that Peter Parker has difficulty holding all of his worlds in place, keeping them separate [2]. The Amazing Spider-Man is a world of binaries, Spider-Man/Peter Parker; Adult/Child; Work/School; even Blond/Brunette. The manichean universe of the super hero comic operates through the continual transgression and reinforcement of the boundary between the terms that repeats what happens with the boundary between the imaginary and the symbolic. The destinies of Betty and Liz in the Spider-man story arc show that once a character is in a super-hero comic book, he or she will not only persist through a multitude of permutations, but that that character will be dragged into the imaginary register from the symbolic one. Liz Allan’s step brother is Molten Man, and she marries Harry Osborne, who becomes the Green Goblin. Betty Brant marries Ned Leeds, who ends up being brainwashed into being the Hobgoblin. Peter Parker’s spider bite does not simply transform him, but the world around him and the people in it as well. The imaginary register thus infects the symbolic and the division of worlds that sustains the heroic universe is difficult to maintain. Transgressing the boundary between the imaginary and symbolic registers is what makes the story interesting. But if the boundary dissolves altogether, the story loses all substance and tension. [1] One wonders why more superheros aren’t like Tintin, who never troubles himself with girls or boys in a romantic or sexual way. [2] That Liz and Betty are both variants of Elizabeth stresses the link between them.

#25 Fictional Realities: Spider-Man and the Import of Continuity in the Superhero Genre

admin — Mon, 30 May 2011 21:04:44 +0000

Continuity - in characterization, the details of character evolution and origins, and the universes that heroes participate in – is essential for the reader of mainstream superhero comics in order to create a sense of personal investment in both the storyline and the heroes themselves. The readership paradoxically demands a strict adherence to the ‘reality’ of the universe in which they encounter their fictional characters, while accepting that these characters are often imbued with specious or fantastic powers. Scholarship as well likes absolutes in order to generate discussion – we need stability in our referents in order to be able to construct arguments where basic principles are understood by our audiences. In dealing with characters that have been written about over, quite frequently, more than half a century, authors frequently encounter many problems in navigating the demands of the universes that they are writing for. Long-running comics present a number of issues in regard to consistency in their narration and plot points because of their polyphonic nature, with each subsequent author of a character wanting to put his or her own mark on the title. This said, when faced with a character like Spider-Man, an author doesn’t so much write the character as he writes ‘into’ or ‘for’ him based on the precedents that have been established by previous authors – current popular comics’ writers like Bendis, Johns and Morrison are all self-professed superhero scholars, capable of citing decades-old details and sometimes retconning these to attempt to reinvigorate characters that have grown static or playing to audiences that appreciate nostalgia in their stories. Individual authorship here is problematic, and one cannot help but be tempted to invoke Foucault’s author function in light of the way that the superhero genre is delivered, inferring that in comics the primacy of content over authorial context has finally found purchase. This can be both a positive and negative attribute of comics, though, as it creates a sense of familiarity but can also inhibit character growth and development. This was not always the case, however. In early Spider-Man, for example, when he was a new and inviting character, consistency mattered much less than it now does with Amazing Spider- Man nearing its 700th issue. In his first appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15, even Spider-Man’s name wasn’t consistent, alternating between “Spiderman” and the hyphenated “Spider-Man.” J. Jonah Jameson, publisher of the Daily Bugle, shifted to becoming the publisher of “Now” magazine and then back to the Bugle in early issues of Amazing, and other problems arose regarding adherence to detail in subsequent issues based on information given previously. However, even in these early stages of Spider-Man’s development, we can see how creator Stan Lee was aware that outside reality in his fantasy needed to be maintained – the first appearance of the Vulture, in Amazing #2, makes sure to let the reader know that the villain’s wings are an artificial construction, even while the onlookers of his crimes are perplexed as to how a man could fly on his own power. Though the reader is asked to suspend reality to the degree that he can accept his hero’s abilities, grounding this belief in a plausible framework is essential for the hero’s (and the title’s) success. Spider-Man’s webs, for example, are explained as a “special fluid” that is a product of his prowess in chemistry, and Lee refined these details in order to make a central, coherent universe in which the character could operate – with occasional crossovers with other titles like Fantastic Four and X-Men – before leaving the series with issue #110 in the hands of Gerry Conway. The central aspects of Spider-Man’s origins remained (and still remain) constant, ensuring continuing readership, despite numerous retellings and revisionings, such as Loeb and Sale’s compelling Spider-Man: Blue. Suspension of reality, then, only goes so far as to invite the reader to participate in the universe of the superhero, and once the universe has been defined, it is fixed – too much cognitive disconnect within it and the reader is not able to identify with the title, whether this be in the reality of the universe itself or in the nuances of the plotlines, carried out over decades. As Spider-Man continued and more authors were accepted into the fold, new series arose – Spectacular Spider-Man first in the 70’s, followed by Web of Spider-Man in the 80’s and simply Spider-Man in the 90’s, each having to adhere to the information that came before it. Though there were some shake-ups in character development, anything that was a huge reversal for the character was both denounced by the readership and reworked so as to eliminate consistency issues – this was most notable recently in the Clone Saga, where it was revealed that the Peter Parker we had been following was actually the ‘real’ Spider-Man’s clone (very confusing), and in Civil War, where Spider-Man revealed his identity to the world under the Superhuman Registration Act. This latter was so reviled by the readership of Marvel Comics, as shown through letters to the publisher and on Marvel’s message boards, that immediately on the conclusion of the summer ‘event’ of Civil War, Spider-Man’s identity was re-concealed from the world (thanks to the efforts of Dr. Strange) so as to maintain the central attributes that, in effect, make Spider-Man the familiar character that the readership demands. Changes have occurred, certainly, as otherwise the title would hardly be as entertaining as it is and readers would become tired of repeated storylines. Indeed, Conway, in making his own mark, within two years of taking over Amazing, killed off love interest Gwen Stacy and introducing the Punisher, currently a mainstay of the Marvel Universe. Peter Parker has had several careers, from photographer to high school teacher to, currently, a professional academic in a think-tank. One sees that there is a progression in characterization that is more fulfillment of Parker’s original desire for acceptance amongst his peers (though, admittedly, that peer group has changed as he has aged), but the central tenets of what we could consider a platonic “Spider-Man” must be acknowledged when writing for the character. More importantly, the details of all of these stages of progression are of extreme significance to the long-term reader that has given Spider-Man (and countless other heroes) such success – from names and dates to particular issue numbers when characters have been killed off, revamped, gotten married or had children, the comic reader has become invested in the details just as much as any scholar who has a practiced hand at close reading. The author of superhero comics is then presented with a readership that is arguably far more demanding than in any other genre or medium; he must cater to the nostalgic elements of the character he is assigned which have ensured his title’s longevity while still offering compelling narratives that will entice the reader into continuing to follow the hero’s adventures. When a major alteration is attempted, this is interestingly accomplished outside of the mainstream universe in which the reader has his particular expectations that authors will adhere to the detailed histories of their characters. For Marvel, the central universe has been named “Earth 616” – this is the environment that most casual comics’ readers will be familiar with, and what we might think of as canon. The panoply of Marvel characters function in this universe, and they must adhere to the rich histories that have come in countless crossovers, guest appearances and in their own multiple titles. Reboots and dramatic shifts are so anathema to comics’ mainstay readership that they must occur under what are normally considered “imprints” of the central publishing line and are therefore understood to be outside of the main continuity; these have been, notably, “New Universe,” “Ultimate Comics” and most recently “Icon,” though there have been many others over the decades. While Spider-Man asks the reader to set aside notions of plausibility in the character’s origin (and the origins of some of his notable opponents), this must be compensated for by a far stricter adherence to the realities of the fictional world in which he acts. Though this was quite simple in the earliest issues of the title (even if it was somewhat ineffective), when Marvel began in Amazing #1 asking for audience participation and investment in the form of letters, it began engendering a response that was highly engaged in the storylines and consistency of character and plot details. Even the first letters, printed in issue #3 of Amazing, highlight the nature of this engagement; for this letters page, Margaret Seth wrote: “Having read almost as many stories as you have written I feel my opinion is as good as the next fellow’s. Meaning to say that your startling story in #1 copy of Spider-Man was terrific. But may I ask what in the world did you do to the second part? Is he so different that nothing can go his way? Your next issue is supposed to be great, but if more of your fans such as I feel this way after reading the first issue… well, I don’t think I’d waste my good money on another copy like the first.” (Citation). It is this attitude amongst readers, demanding consistency even in character reaction to his fictional world, that has created the investment that has made the character last for so long – it is also this now involuntary close reading on the part of the fans that demands that the particularities of the interactional space be fixed, as readers trace out the complex histories of even the most peripheral characters and feel invested in the imaginary world of their heroes.

#26 Stand by Your (Spider-)Man: Aunt May, MJ, and the Cost of War

admin — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 15:40:25 +0000

The recurring theme in Marvel's Civil War arc is sacrifice and loss. Richard Reed loses Sue and indeed the entire foundation of their relationship -- her awe of his morality and strength -- to Tony Stark's plans. Stark loses his growing fatherly relationship with Peter Parker and his personal battle with sobriety. Canada loses its Alpha Flight (a totally unacceptable casualty of war!). And at the end of it all, Steve Rogers loses his life -- maybe. Indeed the entire central premise of the Super Hero Registration Act is one of sacrifice, wherein a hero can trade his or her anonymity for government-granted legitimacy. But sometimes (and often most compellingly), the ones making the sacrifices aren't the ones in the capes. From the Road to Civil War imprint on, Mary Jane and Aunt May are pivotal to the choices and decisions Peter Parker makes about his support, and later rejection, of the SHRA. In these early issues, Peter (and to a certain extent, MJ) treat Stark as a father figure -- it is, we are told repeatedly, Peter's trust in Stark that wins Peter's agreement with the SHRA, even though he has early misgivings. And while MJ is appreciative of the support they receive from Stark -- especially the new costume that will keep her husband safer -- Stark is also an incredibly intrusive presence, particularly in her life. (He even has an eagle statue placed in MJ and Peter's room for communication, but MJ wonders if the statue can see into the room and therefore see her at various stages of undress. Not so fatherly a figure, then.) In this Road to Civil War series, readers are reminded that Spider-Man has a lot to lose by going public with his identity. Many superheroes are unattached, or their romantic involvements are with other superheroes, but Peter's deepest attachments are in the civilian world. Peter, very much a family man in his uncaped life, must sacrifice his privacy -- and therefore the identities of the two people closest to him, MJ and Aunt May -- in order to support Stark's SHRA drive. In fact, this fact almost stops Peter from unmasking, until his Aunt May presents him with a "classic" Spider-Man costume and remind him of his Uncle Ben's words, adding, "Responsibility means you don't run away when someone asks, 'Who did that?'" The tragedy in Aunt May giving Peter that final push in favour of registration comes near the end of Civil War, of course, because Peter's deepest fears do come true: Aunt May is shot in the stomach (though the sniper had been aiming for he and MJ). As Kingpin quotes Euripides, "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad."* The question of whether the Civil War has been worth it is perhaps most acute in this moment. Throughout the texts of Civil War, whether Spider-Man is supporting or rejecting the SHRA, Aunt May and MJ offer uncompromising support. It's an interesting contrast to Richard and Sue Reed; Sue is empowered to disagree with her husband's position and join with the doomed resistance fighters. Is it her own superheroism that allows Sue to disagree with her powered spouse? Is there space for an uncaped hanger-on like MJ or Aunt May to disagree with Spidey? It raises questions about the role of non-powered characters -- who are, of course, usually women and children -- in the Marvel world. Can they do anything but stand by their men? ----- * Before you jump in and tell me that Aunt May doesn't really die, (1) I'm only dealing with the Civil War arc here, and (2) Peter only saves Aunt May by making a deal with Mephisto: Aunt May will survive if Peter turns back time and erases his marriage to MJ -- and their future daughter, too. (See the truly terrible One More Day / Brand New Day arcs for that story.) Pretty significant sacrifice for caped and uncaped, there. Either Aunt May dies or Mary Jane loses everything she has built her life around. Oh, Spidey.

#27 Batman: Origins and Revisions

admin — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:43:11 +0000

Though there have been many Golden Age superheroes who have lasted into the present day with continually running serials (Superman, Captain America, and the entire Justice Society of America for example), few have had the staying power and continued cultural relevance as Batman. Why is this the case? Of all of the super heroes that have transitioned into other media and popular culture, Batman is, at least on the surface, the most simple: a child whose parents were murdered in front of his eyes dons a costume in order to exact vengeance on the “stupid and cowardly lot” who would seek to do the same to others. Unlike other popular characters, he has no fantastic power other than that of great wealth and training, and his sense of justice is, with the possible exception of Superman, the least nuanced of all the mainstream heroes – for Batman, there has consistently been a definitive line between right and wrong that needs to be upheld. At first glance, Batman has all the makings of an entirely archetypal hero, easily deciphered and dispensed with in order to move on to more elaborate fare. This said, Batman is the most prolific character in comics, having had multiple series at any given moment along with countless one-shots, miniseries and crossovers over the decades. Detective Comics, of which Batman has been the main focus since his first appearance, is second only to Action Comics as superhero comics’ longest running title (as of this writing, it stands at issue #877), and his solo title has recently surpassed 700 issues itself. Batman currently has more ongoing titles than any other DC character, with new series being added annually. Legends of the Dark Knight ran for over 200 issues, and there have been other major titles starring the character, such as Shadow of the Bat, that have lasted several years on their own as well. Despite being a DC character, he has made guest appearances in Marvel titles as well as those of other smaller publishing houses, is the focus of many novels, movies and TV serials including live action and cartoons, and he is also the most widely discussed character in these early stages of mainstream comics transitioning into the academic arena. Despite his apparent simplicity then, Batman is a staple of comic fandom and has maintained relevance across generations as he nears his 75^th anniversary. Created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger in 1939, Batman came about largely as a response to the success of Siegel and Shuster’s Superman – the publisher was looking for new ways to capitalize on the public’s growing interest in costumed crimefighting and was eager to add new characters to its stable. He was not a new invention by any stretch of the imagination, the general concept, if not the details, having been born out of the detective serials of the 1930’s. While detective fiction abounded, however, the superhero was a relatively new invention for the era. That the rise of the costumed hero came about during the final stages of the Great Depression in America is hardly a surprise as well, as many scholars have noted: Unsure of the stability of the nation, the costumed hero who brought social justice where the government had so dramatically failed was needed escapism for a people desperate for order and equity, a fantasy of rationality and a good-versus-evil paradigm when so many were suffering under the apparent collapse of capitalism. Appearing first in Detective Comics #27 (though we don’t see a hint of his origins until issue #33), the introduction of Batman marked a shift in the title – prior to his invention, Detective was a traditional gumshoe serial that introduced characters of little staying power (with Shuster and Siegel’s pre-Superman character Slam Bradley being the notable exception). At 64 pages per issue, early Detective was an anthology comic and offered multiple mystery and crime tales, with only a few stories being serialized beyond their individual issues. Bob Kane’s previous character for Detective, Oscar the Gumshoe, had seen moderate success with fans, but it was his idea for a “Bat-Man” (note the original hyphen) based on a composite of Douglas Fairbanks, Da Vinci sketches and Sherlock Holmes that caught his publisher’s interest. Bill Finger was assigned to assist with the character, and it was actually Finger who created the costume that has become so iconic –Kane’s original design was more a clone of Superman with red colouring, no cape and a mask instead of a cowl. Though Kane is normally credited with the creation of the character, Finger’s role in his development cannot be underestimated. The Batman appearing in these earliest issues of Detective was quite different from what readers are now familiar with; despite the costume and secret identity, he was more of a traditional private dick, even carrying a gun. Criminals were killed without remorse by this Batman, and his nemeses were far less grandiose and fantastic than those we see in later issues of Detective and his solo title, with Batman foiling normal heists, mob bosses and the occasional mad scientist. In order to access a younger demographic, however, DC (then National Publications) requested that Batman have a child sidekick. Kane had originally envisioned a super-powered youth, but it was one of his assistants, Jerry Robinson, who was instrumental in conceiving of the original Robin who, like Batman, had no fantastic powers to create an entry point of identification for younger readers. From Robin’s introduction in Detective Comics #38 on, the series took on a more youthful tone, and in the Silver Age Batman began to battle more fantastic creatures such as space aliens and time-traveling cavemen in order to capture the younger demographic. The earlier issues were still mysteries, however, and the book remained an anthology title with other stories with various characters running alongside a regular Batman feature for several years. The question remains: why has Batman survived for so long, visioned and revisioned by countless authors and artists over the decades while all pointing back to a platonic Batman as established by Kane and Finger’s original concept? It could be, perhaps, a relation of our original desire to see justice served, and a knowledge that our own, governmentally mandated law and order allows for inequities on an almost comical magnitude – it was this concept that served as the impetus for Batman and other superheroes, after all. It could also be the stark vision of legality that we see in Batman’s understanding of good and evil, simplifying for the reader a complex dynamic of conflicting moralities in order to bring some stability to our own, often overwhelmed perspectives on the social world – the truth for a detective is definitive, and in these stories one just needs to be able to decipher the clues in the correct way in order to rationalize the overly problematic. Bruce Wayne is also a member of the American elite, and there is certainly a precedent for interest in celebrity culture and a desire to see these cultural icons as something more than human. These points, though certainly being elements of his success, could be made of all detective fiction, from Sherlock Holmes to Dick Tracy to the Green Hornet, and there is clearly something more to Batman’s specific character that makes him survive and remain relevant. Batman succeeds, more likely, because of the innovative blend between heroism and the everyday – his powers are the result of exhaustive training and a vast fortune inherited from his parents, making him accessible to the readership in a way that nearly all other superheroes are not. His origin, boiled down, is the platonic revenge tale that one sees in Shakespearian or Greek tragedy, and in this Batman is a blank canvas on which authors have been able to expand and expound on the core facets of his character over many years. He struggles to discover his true identity while driven by fanatical vengeance, and at times we are unsure of which character, Wayne or Batman, is really the mask. Despite the division, he exists in a world of certitudes and strength of character, showing us that order may come from chaos given enough perseverance and the right motivation at our backs, and these attributes involve us in his stories while prompting us to recognize and reconcile the moral inequities that we notice in our own lives. While beginning as a simple vigilante with what could be considered a basic origin, Batman has been chiseled into a character as complex as the sum of the authors who have tried their hands at relating his saga – the posts in the coming weeks will be exploring some of these revisions, extensions and reworkings of continuity.

#28 Boredom and Batman

admin — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 22:21:51 +0000

Two things are important to know about Batman / Bruce Wayne: 1) he's bent on revenge and vigilante justice; 2) he's bored. Boredom is a running theme in Batman. Everyone--Batman, the villains, the People of Gotham--is bored, except the police who are kept busy because everyone else is so bored they keep committing crimes. The dominance of boredom as a theme in Batman comics brings about a discussion of motivations. Is boredom a motivation in Batman? Does the Batman come about as a result of the boredom that consumes the lonely, but filthy-rich, Bruce Wayne? Taking Umberto Eco's ideas in the Myth of Superman as a starting point, there's an argument to be made that says modern comicbook superheroes are not only "inconsumable," they're stuck in perpetual boredom as a result. Boredom, or having time on one's hands, is an essential component of the comicbook superhero. Even their jobs--usually as newspaper reporters / photographers, or independently wealthy scientists--allow for big chunks of unoccupied time where boredom leads to fantastic creativity, particularly in the manufacture of skills, weaponry, and the collection, implementation, and amassing of intelligence. In short, boredom is the superhero's trump card. The header of the first Batman story runs as follows: "The 'Bat-Man.' A mysterious and adventurous figure, fighting for righteousness and apprehending the wrong doer, in his lone battle against the evil forces of society... his identity remains unknown." We are then introduced to "The home of commissioner Gordon, who at the moment is entertaining his young socialite friend, Bruce Wayne." Wayne, smoking a pipe and leaning dejectedly on his palm, asks Gordon, "Well commissioner, anything exciting happening these days?" Mimicking the set-up of Sherlock Holmes in which Holmes is utterly bored with nothing to do, the comic introduces a murder and the detective narrative is off. But it all starts as a cure for boredom, not the need to impose a higher moral purpose and understanding. As soon as the action heats up in the story, Bruce Wayne grows bored, and, tapping out his pipe, he tells Gordon: "Ho Hum! I'll leave you here to finish your work... I'm going home." Of course, much action occurs afterward with Batman solving, and explaining how he solved, the case. The end of the story comes after Bruce Wayne visits the commissioner again and, after listening to Gordon's recounting of the previous night's affair, remarks, "Hmm, a very lovely fairy-tale commissioner indeed." The commissioner, lighting a celebratory cigar after Wayne has left, mutters, "Bruce Wayne is a nice chap, but he certainly must lead a boring life... seems disinterested in everything." The final two frames of the story reveal Bruce Wayne as the Batman. The irony isn't lost on the reader: Bruce Wayne isn't bored or disinterested, he's The Bat-Man! All this to note that at the beginning of the next story, the preamble reads a little differently: "The 'Bat-Man,' a mysterious and adventurous figure, fighting for righteousness and apprehending the menaces of society in his lone battle against the evil. His identity remains unknown (He is one Bruce Wayne, bored young socialite.)" Boredom, then, has become one of the primary descriptors of The Bat-Man's identity. To take it a step further, one of the primary reasons Bruce Wayne fights crime is because he's bored. As noted in a previous post, at the earlier stages of the Batman comic book, we don't yet have the revenge origin story. In the beginning, there was boredom without revenge. Batman's boredom is an alibi, it allows him to protect his secret identity (how could someone so boring be the Batman?), and, later, it masks a deep-seated moral righteousness that fuels his on-going quest for revenge. He is someone who has it all, except excitment in his life. Even his coterie of villans lack motivation after a while and exist solely to get the Batman--they're all so bored with petty crimes they need to make things personal. Frank Miller has The Joker so bored he's in a coma for a decade because the Bat-Man retires. What boredom tells us about Superheroes is that their motivations were, and are, not always about doing the right thing, or taking the moral high ground (no matter how tenuously). Instead, our heroes sometimes typify the crisis of modern life: filling those moments where there's nothing to do with something meaningful. The moral of these tales might well be that if you're bored, as so many kids then and now are, go out and do something righteous and mysterious, not criminal. Moreover, Batman's bored alter-ego represents a counter-point to the exciting, dangerous, life of a crime-fighter. It conveys a lack of seriousness about something (crime, impetus, disguise) that is usually seen as a very serious matter. Our heroes have a sense of flippancy and irreverence that we often miss in our suspension of disbelief. How our heroes cope with, and dispatch, their boredom is as much a morality tale as is fighting crime.

#29 Batman's Baby: Batman Year One

admin — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 22:29:56 +0000

Perhaps the most striking feature of the Batman: Year One story arc by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli is how little Batman is in it. He’s there alright, but his story of trying out his skills on the streets of the East Side of Gotham and discovering his bat-based superhero identity plays second fiddle to the existential crisis of Lieutenant James Gordon, who has just been transferred to Gotham from Chicago. Gordon is thrown into a department that is corrupt from the Commissioner on down; his marriage is in crisis; and he’s about to become a father. While Bruce Wayne’s memory of the childhood trauma of seeing his parents killed by a petty criminal appears in the narrative, his present, apart from being stabbed and shot from time to time, is untroubled. All the angst belongs to Gordon. Year One tells the story of James Gordon and Bruce Wayne/Batman forming their partnership in an alternating, initially parallel structure. Each character provides an internal voice over, Gordon in yellow (nicotine stained?) text boxes and Wayne/Batman in white. The establishing panels show Gordon taking the train from Chicago to Gotham while Bruce Wayne flies into the city after twelve years abroad. Gordon has a window seat in a jammed train car that he’s been on for 12 hours. The woman beside him is breast-feeding a child (symbolic perhaps of Gordon’s impending paternity); people are sleeping and checking their watches; luggage bins are jammed overhead. These details show that Gordon is down “in” the world, enmeshed in it, trapped in it. Reality is too much with him. Wayne, meanwhile, is above this world and its discomforts: “From here, it’s clean shafts of concrete and snowy rooftops.... From here it looks like an achievement.”

And when Wayne thinks to himself that he should have taken the train to get closer to Gotham’s reality, it only illustrates his voyeuristic desire to go slumming. When he takes himself to the extra-corrupt East Side to test his crime-fighting skills, the effect is the same. Miller and Mazzucchelli maintain this contrast between the characters and their worlds until the very end of the narrative when they come together to form an alliance. So the story of Batman: Year One is that of a relationship between two men with two different realities that dictate their motivations and abilities to act. Gordon needs Batman as a kind of extra-legal supplement while Bruce Wayne needs Gordon to give birth to Batman and ground him in the world of crime and the law.

Gordon is an archetypal tough cop hero: disgusted yet incorruptible, but not above taking out a little extracurricular vengeance on fellow officers who do him wrong. But Gordon’s private life creates the narrative tension, not his struggle against corruption. His disgust with the world makes him wonder whether family life is even possible. With a patriarchal arrogance, he doubts whether evil Gotham, and the larger world that it represents, is a place for women and children.

Furthermore, he and Barbara fight constantly.... Things don’t look good. In spite of his efforts to stay faithful to Barbara, Gordon finds himself attracted to Detective Sarah Essen. They go out for coffee regularly after work and end up kissing in the rain [1]. Police Commissioner Loeb tries to use this relationship to blackmail Gordon but Gordon nullifies the threat by coming clean with Barbara.

Lieutenant Gordon is tangled up in both the gritty world of crime and the complicated world of domesticity that ultimately justifies fighting crime in the first place. Gordon represents the tangle, the knot of existence that makes us act. Bruce Wayne, in contrast, is free of all that. He has no job, and he has a butler, not a spouse. His disengagement highlights Gordon’s entanglement all the more, as Gordon’s visit to Wayne Manor shows. For some reason, Gordon brings Barbara along as he tries to figure out whether Wayne could be Batman: “Better than having Barbara stay at home and worry about being so overdue...” (4.8.1). Bruce appears in a dressing gown next to a lingerie-clad woman whom he says doesn’t speak any language he understands. While it is obvious that Wayne is putting up a front here--portraying himself as a dissipated playboy who couldn’t possibly be Batman--the fact that he is able to put up such a front says it all. He has no romantic entanglements to drag him into the domestic world, unlike Gordon, who must live in the world of affairs, babies, and marriage counsellors. The problem with Bruce Wayne’s freedom/disengagement is that it doesn’t legitimate his actions. Crime fighting becomes just a peculiar and perhaps perverse hobby.

Selina Kyle, who transforms into Catwoman after seeing Batman on the news, represents an intermediate space between Gordon and Wayne [2]. Selina, a dominatrix/prostitute, not only has a multitude of cats, which gives rise to a nice cat lady/Catwoman visual joke, but also a “ward” in Holly Robinson, a teenaged prostitute. Selina is both a part of the “vice” of the city and a person with ties, however makeshift. Again, by contrast, we see that Bruce Wayne has no one to look after, not even a cat. Indeed, the only other person in his life, Alfred, looks after him, nursing his wounds and fetching his tights [3]. Bruce Wayne meets Holly and Selena as he cruises the East Side of Gotham, looking for some criminals to test his skills on. Even though he takes steps to disguise himself, Bruce is clearly out of place and his disguise is not convincing. Holly’s pimp makes him for a cop. And when Bruce tackles the pimp, Holly stabs him in the thigh in punishment for his outsider meddling. Without his “otherworldly” bat persona, Bruce Wayne is a flop as a crime fighter; he is another trouble maker in a bad neighborhood [4]. A costume and persona, however, are only part of what he requires. Mostly he needs a connection, an investment. Without them, he is just a bored socialite working out his psychodrama in public.

Consequently, Miller and Mazzucchelli set up the climax of Batman Year One in a way that makes the public and the private converge as it brings Gordon and Batman together as a team. When Commissioner Loeb’s attempt to blackmail Gordon fails, The Roman, a gangster with his fingers in the pie of city politics, sends his nephew Johnny to kidnap Gordon’s newborn. In assigning the task, The Roman says, “Once a man becomes a father he is never truly free” (4.16.5). The domesticity that entangles Gordon in the conventions of domestic reality becomes the tool to entangle him in the corruption that everyone else in the Gotham police department and city politics partakes in. On that level, the baby is symbol of Gordon’s commitment to marriage, fatherhood, domesticity. The baby itself is a kind of entanglement.

But the baby also represents a fresh start, a freedom from corruption that the kidnapping would taint. If the kidnapping is successful Gordon’s bleak assessment of Gotham comes true: it is no place for a child. So if Batman doesn’t save the baby, any notion of the city being worth saving dies. But Batman isn’t the saviour here, Bruce Wayne is. When Alfred offers to fetch his tights prior to his intervening in the kidnapping, Bruce says, “never during the day” (4.16.3). Bruce Wayne as Bruce Wayne saves the baby because the symbol of Batman requires something connected to domestic reality behind it, an alter ego who has some connection to the world that James Gordon lives in every day. When I say “requires” here I mean that Batman Year One suffers an anxiety that Batman will be (and perhaps has been) disconnected from reality, and that this story of beginnings intends to ensure the connection between the superhero and social realism. The irony here is that Miller and Mazzucchelli make the connection to realism symbolically. When Bruce Wayne emerges from the mud of the river proffering the baby to Gordon, it signifies that connection. This is not a sci-fi fantasy world of formidable evil powers threatening the planet [5]. Rather, it is a world of everyday problems of people trying to make it in a corrupt political world. So...Bruce Wayne needs to save the baby that links those worlds to legitimate Batman’s functioning. Once Bruce saves Gordon’s baby and through doing so establishes a “relationship” with the lieutenant, Batman, as a meaningful symbol, can begin to work to save Gotham. Bruce is not just meddling here, he’s giving birth to something, a symbolic transaction with Gordon that is a deal to work together to keep public corruption and crime from infecting the domestic world. Gordon gives Wayne an investment in the personal, domestic realm where people have bonds with each other, and Wayne provides Gordon a “deus ex machina” to fight corruption and crime in Gotham. In the symbolic sense, the baby is theirs, and the muddy waters of the river provide an appropriate birthing scene. The narrative ends with news of a threat to poison the Gotham Reservoir: “Calls himself the Joker.” The final image is of Gordon smiling, and smoking a pipe: “I’ve got a friend coming who might be able to help. Should be here any minute” (4. 25.5). It’s the first time in the story that we have seen Gordon with any level of contentment. And, with Bruce Wayne having stitched himself into the social fabric through his baby rescue, Batman can be freed to fight the wacko villains one only finds in comic books. [1] In a neat allusive moment, Gordon and Essen have coffee in a diner called “The Hopper”. [2] It’s curious that Selina Kyle gets no internal monologue/ voice over like the male characters. Why not? How does the Catwoman element of the story fit in? [3] Alfred represents the butler as masculine mother. [4] Part of the Batman mythology concerns why Bruce Wayne needs a costume to fight crime, how it is necessary for him to become a symbol. We might argue that “becoming symbol” is a kind of absolution from the social world. [5] The “goofy” world of Batman that we see most prominently in the campy Adam West TV show is contained in Commissioner Loeb’s office, which is stuffed with pop memorabilia, including a “Peanuts” lamp.

#30 Who Wears the Tights in this Relationship?: Selfhood and Identity in Grant Morrison's Batman and Robin

admin — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 13:00:11 +0000

A confession before I begin: I never really liked Batman. (I know, he's crushed.) I always found him, like Superman, too perfect to root for. Like, oh, great, your superpower is tons of money, awesome. So thrilled for you. Somehow, to my childmind, being bitten by a radioactive spider seemed infinitely more possible than inheriting an untold fortune. There was nothing to cheer for in Batman, to me, and so he didn't hold my interest. That said, as much as I dislike Batman, I totally love Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely -- they have a partnership that works incredibly well, whether in the disturbing and distressing We3, the confusing but exciting JLA: Earth 2, or my recent favourite, their successful attempt to breathe new and more interesting life into Superman in All-Star Superman. So when tasked with writing about Batman for this Graphixia round, there was really one one place to go: Grant Morrison's Batman and Robin series, with the first three issues illustrated by Frank Quitely. I had to do a fair amount of background reading to get up to speed, though, since I'd been away from the Caped Crusader -- movies featuring Christian Bale's stupid BatVoice excluded -- for quite some time. Batman and Robin appears after Morrison's Batman: RIP and Battle for the Black Cowl runs, and after the DC world event Final Crisis. At this point in the narrative, Batman is dead. Well, okay, really he's "dead," but the important thing is that he isn't around fighting crime anymore. To fill the vacuum, there has been a fair amount of shuffling of the BatDeck -- which opens up a space for this series to be a fantastic metacommentary on the idea of the superhero as more role than man. (Which nicely continues on from the most recent episode of The More Trivial the Better, coming to an iPod near you soon.) See, Gotham needs Batman. The city can't function without him. Good old Commissioner Gordon can't keep up and the criminals are riding roughshod over the city. So they need Batman. Or, more to the point, they need a Batman, which is where things get a little interesting. Richard "Dick" Grayson was once Robin, but he got too old for the role and eventually branched out on his own as Nightwing. He remained connected to the BatFamily, though, and supported Tim Drake's desire to be the new Robin. (In between, Jason Todd was Robin -- but he got murdered and then was alive again but turned out to be crazy evil, so nevermind. He's back as a villain in this series.) After Batman's death ("death"), Tim Drake is convinced that Batman is alive and takes off, now as Red Robin, to track him down. Damian Wayne, Batman's son -- I know, I know, more backstory I'm not getting into -- takes on the role of Robin, and Nightwing becomes Batman. So. Dick Grayson -> Robin -> Nightwing -> Batman. Jason Todd -> Robin -> Red Hood -> Evil. Tim Drake -> Robin -> Red Robin. Damian Wayne -> Robin. Everyone on the same page? It's made real for us here just how important the uniform is and, by extension, how unimportant the individual is. The resident of each suit is transient; so long as the role is filled, Gotham is protected. It doesn't feel that way to Dick Grayson, though. He's distressed by the sense that the police don't take him seriously and by his difficulties controlling Damian/Robin. Dick/Batman feels out of place, and while the suit conveys strength and protection to the residents of Gotham, it evokes only feelings of fraud in the wearer in this case. Dick/Batman is nearly paralyzed by his desire to uphold the values Bruce Wayne's Batman stood for, which allows this series to offer a space to ask what role the role itself plays -- how much flexibility can there ever be in what Batman is? And what about Robin? And Dick/Batman is so convinced that he cannot fill these shoes that he attempts to resurrect Bruce/Batman, and instead finds himself nearly killed by a BatReplica Zombie in a Batman-on-Zombie-Batman-and-also-BatGirl disorienting juggernaut bout. As Gordon says, this new Batman is "different, maybe... but familiar." This question of role and flexibility is brought into focus through the contrast with Damian/Robin. Damian's grandfather is Ra's al Ghul, a Batman universe villain, and he represents a struggle between good and evil. But with Damian, the good is imposed by Bruce Wayne -- his last ("last") wish is for Damian to not kill anyone -- and the desire to harm and destroy is difficult to ignore. We see in issue 3, for example, that Damian eschews protecting and helping the victims of a villain in favour of pursuing the villain for vengeance. Can you be Robin if you're secretly evil? But Damian, by following his father to Wayne Manor, has made a move to directly reject his mother's side of the family and the evil in that lineage. He is left not quite sure where he fits, especially should his sojourn as Robin not work out. In issues two and three, we see the metaphorical issue of identity and selfhood emerge ever more clearly with the return of the villain Professor Pyg, whose horror and villainy of choice is to replace a living victim's face with a doll mask, thus rendering him/her "perfect" in Pyg's eyes and erasing any selfhood or identity, at the same time installing a kind of zombiefying mind-control; while Batman and Robin are struggling to fill their new roles and understand their new identities, they must hunt down a villain who specializes in the destruction of identity. Deep, right? And then we are given another villain, Flamingo, interested only in skinning and eating the faces of his victims. And another villain whose face is on fire, and when people rush to help them, he burns them too. Faces are under assault in this series, standing in as representations of the trouble with identity inherent to the superhero role swap. One way Morrison has played with identity in this version of Batman is by reversing the personalities of Batman and Robin. Where previous Robins provided the comic relief to Bruce Wayne's intensity as Batman, Dick/Batman here is the comic one, undercutting the (occasionally frightening) intensity of Damian/Robin. This flip is indicative the discomfort both men feel in their new roles: Dick never wanted to replace Batman and so shies away from adopting his personality; Damian, conversely, wanted to take over his father's legacy on his own and resents the sidekick role (going so far as to try and change the team moniker to Robin and Batman). Morrison gives the vigilante Red Hood -- Jason Todd, former Robin -- awareness of Batman's existence as more brand and image than reality; he tells us Batman is "a brand, a logo, an idea gone past its sell-by date. We're the competition. We're making him obsolete, like the iPod killed the Walkman." Todd studies marketing strategy and stages a viral media assault (complete with webcams) against Batman to demonstrate that the role is only what it is defined as by society -- something Dick Grayson is painfully aware of. And Todd, we realize, does all of this because he couldn't take on the black cowl himself: he could never replace Batman as much as he may have wished it. So he is stuck battling for an identity of his own. Faced with the return of the "dead" Batman, Dick/Batman and Damian/Robin are forced to renegotiate identities once again. This time, it's easier for Dick, who can return to his role as Nightwing. Damian, conversely, wonders if he will be allowed to remain Robin once his father, and presumably Tim, return. Ultimately, it is here where Damian finds some common ground with Dick -- they both find that they need a role, a costume, or a cape to wrap themselves in and shape who they are. Without that, neither man is fully whole. But what happens when you have too many heros and not enough capes?

#31 Continuity Continued: Batman and DC's Elseworlds

admin — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 23:53:22 +0000

Not to play devil’s advocate to our last poster, but Batman has always been the superhero with whom I’ve identified and connected with the most out of the plethora of those characters who exist in both DC and Marvel comics – this could be because he appears the most realistic, with powers that are based predominantly on excessive training and technologies which, albeit specious, don’t disrupt my reality too greatly (and great wealth has always been a more realistic fantasy for me than the ability to fly). More likely, however, it’s because Batman was the first superhero I’d ever read about, having picked up a tattered copy of Miller’s collected Dark Knight Returns in my local library at eight years old, reading it in a single sitting and held rapt by the stark, gritty nature of the character and the dialogue. Though I’ve since learned to approach the text from a more academic standpoint, I don’t think I will ever feel as drawn to Batman – or the superhero genre on the whole – as I did during that first encounter with a world in which justice could be brought to chaos given enough willpower, determination, fanaticism and a sense of responsibility to effect change where one finds often overwhelming inequities. I felt that I understood Batman’s origin and his motivations fully from this single story, allowing me complete and definitive access to Batman as a character. This said, what I first encountered in The Dark Knight Returns was not actually Batman at all – Batman had thrived in DC comics for nearly fifty years prior to Miller’s revisioning of the character at the end of his career, embittered but emboldened by the unswerving social decline of Gotham’s streets and youth. The Dark Knight Returns, a miniseries that, along with the release of Watchmen, prompted DC to fill its UPC boxes on the direct market editions of its entire line of titles with: “DC Comics: they’re not just for kids anymore,” was the first step in a dramatic undertaking by the publisher to remove heroes from their original contexts and provide them with familiar supporting characters and situations while approaching them in a way that was different, sometimes dramatically, from the worlds which the readers knew and had expectations for regarding continuity. Marvel had been attempting this several years prior with its line of What If…? - currently at issue #200 - in which key events in the Marvel Universe are explored from the perspective of hypothetical, alternate outcomes (such as “What if Wolverine had killed the Hulk?” reworking the events of Wolverine’s first appearance in Incredible Hulk #181). The advent of What If…? is significant in that it showcases the importance of continuity for comics’ readership, a point on which I’ve posted before – there would be no interest or upset if the details of characters’ origins and running histories had not already been so engrained in readers’ minds, a constant of how they approach each subsequent issue throughout the Universe’s line of titles. My personal situation was oddly reversed, however; I encountered the revision and had to later piece together the original, scouring for and collecting the texts that defined the character that Miller, in his adaptation, redefined so well. When DC attempted its own first, tenuous version of What If…? in the form of The Dark Knight Returns, the response was significant and has since become, some argue, the entry point for Batman into the academy. Instead of offering a single title devoted to revising key events, DC released one-shots, most frequently presented in squarebound, relatively expensive prestige format issues written and drawn by comicdom’s most important writers of the day. Batman, being arguably DC’s flagship character, was at the core of this new approach – The Dark Knight Returns had gained so much critical acclaim that it only made sense to continue using this character for its continuity bending initiatives. The first of these was Gotham by Gaslight, which incorporated a Victorian styled, steampunk Batman into the mythology of Jack the Ripper, as Batman pursues a copycat killer in Gotham and, of course, eventually brings him to justice. Written and drawn by Mike Mignola and Brian Augustyn, Gaslight has been reprinted multiple times and now thrives as a hardcover edition, appended by the author’s notes and storyboards and its sequel, Batman: Master of the Future. It is one of the texts, alongside The Dark Knight Returns, Arkham Asylum and The Killing Joke, most frequently taught in academic courses featuring Batman, and it has implications that redefined the genre of superhero storytelling. That Dark Knight and Gaslight were both critical successes prompted the imprint, still running to this day, of DC’s Elseworlds. Each of these titles showcased the Elseworlds logo and read, on the back cover, "In Elseworlds, heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places — some that have existed, and others that can't, couldn't or shouldn't exist. The result is stories that make characters who are as familiar as yesterday seem as fresh as tomorrow." In these titles, authors were free to move outside the rigid bounds of continuity and rework characters entirely as they saw fit. Batman is the central figure in the majority of Elseworld titles, with notable examples being Holy Terror, which supposes a theocratic America based on the religious beliefs of Oliver Cromwell, and the more recent, Eisner Award winning Batman: Year One Hundred, a Dark Knight Returns-styled portrayal of a future Batman, beset by similar governmental and social ills. Currently numbering at close to fifty different titles featuring Batman (though there are many more concentrating on other DC characters), these Elseworlds stories often draw from the rich backgrounds of the authors who crafted them, placing Batman anywhere from the French Revolution to the distant future. Most importantly, however, these titles always sketch out a new origin for the character, a reboot through which readers can access the familiar yet different and an entirely self contained story. The existence and success of Elseworlds titles highlights two important functions (other than the telling of normally fascinating and inspired stories) in the comics’ greater universe. Firstly, these tales offer an avenue for new readers to become familiar with a canon that can often be so complex that it denies the casual reader any sense of familiarity or identification. Working within the contained universe of the Elseworlds story, the reader, becoming comfortable, can then work backwards (as I did) to rediscover the original, being the template on which the revision was based¹. The establishing of this avenue is significant, as the decades rich, ostracizing nature of comics’ universes requires these frequent fissures in order to gain readers and continue to publish – besides Elseworlds and What If…?, we see this in Marvel’s Ultimate line and DC’s (albeit short lived) recent All Star line. Secondly, these exceptions are what ultimately help to define the canon on the whole. Canon, in literature as well as in superhero comics, is solidified by what is outside of it; recalling (though reductively) one of the key features of semiotics, we understand best what something is by determining what it is not. Similarly, DC’s attempt to make characters “seem as fresh as tomorrow” actually has the markedly opposite effect, further engraining who and what a character is by putting pressure on him from the outside, highlighting what he is not. The fracturing of continuity through a prism of varied hypothetical circumstances paradoxically serves to make the fictional reality of the narrative that much more grounded. The Elseworlds Batman stories are arguably the most entertaining for those who find them an affront to the reality that they have come to accept for the character (the recent complexity of which was very nicely summarized in last week’s post). While offering access to new readers, they also serve the opposite function of justifying the close reading of long-time followers of the hero, those who are intimately familiar with the minutiae of plot and character development over the years. My personal experience with the character is a case in point – I began on the fringes of the DCU and was compelled by the fact that I had mapped out a contained universe in one volume. Entering the title(s) on the whole, I found a far richer, more complex environment that similarly housed a definite world, with characters that could be mapped and traced onto an often byzantine canon that, while sometimes fantastic and carrying the quirks of any multi-authored work, was also stable and just as defined as any other single text.

1 We can see this in recent literature as well, with sales figures showing a rise in Austen texts after the publication of the interesting revisions Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

#32 Boobs and Babes or, Why Comics Suck

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 21:26:25 +0000

As the catchy title suggests, this post is about women and comic books. It’s also about exclusion and inclusion. Comic book fans like to talk about how "inclusive" and "collaboratory" the medium is; a rich melange of artists, writers, colourists, and inkers: story-tellers all. Comic book readers are well informed, well read, and well aware of most intricacies a critic might examine. There’s no doubt that the community around comic books is an enlightened and contemplative group, exemplified by their devotion to the medium and the craft of creating it. But… Conversations about comic book characters tend to centre on discussions of exclusion—how Peter Parker is a nerdy kid who we all identify with, who doesn't "belong." How any one of us could be Superman if we could just shed our Clark Kent cookie-cutter goodie work-a-day suits and take to the radical, rarefied air of physical dominance unconscious of how others perceive us. We’re all super in disguise. We all want to belong, but we’re part of a marginalized sub-set who read comic books in bed, with a flashlight, alone. We know there are others like us and we seek them out and, in the end, we "belong": "Comic Book Nerds" all.

However, anyone who has had the misfortune of walking into a comic book store knows, the community that says it is all about sharing, can be all about exclusion too. In fact, being a comic book fan is often an egotistical gambit that highlights esoteric knowledge and obscene collections. There isn’t another place on earth other than perhaps inside the IT department of your most recent employer that attacks the ignorant, but eager, more than the collected masses of the comic book store. For all its representations of the marginalized geek, the comic book encourages the same pack-rat behaviours the comic fan deplores in the jocks and “normals” who persecute them in everyday life. Comic books don't encourage acceptance, they encourage exclusion and exclusivity—the very same things that self-described comic book nerds often say led them to comic book stories (and stores) in the first place. And, the clearest example of this exclusionary tendency is nowhere more evident than in comic book representations of women.

Often approached through an analysis of comic book readership, which is predominantly male, the representation of women in comic books prioritizes a particular type of form and substance. Furthermore, the comic book fan rarely—though they would argue stringently the opposite—accepts a divergent storyline, so committed are they to the cyclical narratives and stories of the genre (how many times have we heard about Batman’s origins?). For all its talk of marginalized representation, the superhero comic book tends to represent adolescent (or “mature adolescent”) characters who are white, middle or upper class, and marginalized not by race, creed, religion, sex, or sexual orientation, but because of their adroit intelligence or lack of social skills; and we see this fundamental architecture over and over again even though the stories and characters might change. Even when other marginalized figures—those marginalized by race, creed, etc.—are present, they tend to embody the stereotypes that white, middle or upper class, social misfits most fear.

If we concentrate on female representations in comic books, for now, we must ask two questions: 1) where are the women? And 2) where are the “ordinary” women. There are lots of extraordinary women; extraordinarily beautiful, dangerous, perceptive, and invisible. That last one is the giveaway. Not only are females (and I am using that term on purpose here, to belabor the point) under-represented, but they are also, in the grand tradition, usually sculpted from a dominant, authentic, primary (you pick) “male” version. Female superheroes with similar names to their male counterparts abound: Ms. Marvel, Marvel Girl, Supergirl / Woman, Batgirl / Woman, Spider-Woman. Even somewhat original names are eclipsed by their semantic closeness: “Wonder” Woman, “Cat” Woman, “Panther” Girl, all of which suggest associations to Batman or Superman or the "Boy" Wonder. Even names like “Storm” and “Rogue” suggest the climatic conditions of the pre-menstrual cycle, or the cringe-worthy clicking wink of a Mama-Grizzly-shootin' Sarah Palin.

A websites such as “Women in Refrigerators” is well worth a look for examples of the way female disfigurement and disempowerment jump start story lines for male superheroes. Even a quick review of the superpowers possessed by female superheroes reveals a mail sack of patriarchal cliches and masculine insecurities surrounding the powers of the “other,” or “opposite” sex. Invisibility (Sue Storm, Fantastic Four) is particularly appropriate given the marginalized position of women historically, as is Jean Grey’s power to read the mind (Emma Frost also comes to mind) and Wonder Woman’s ability to force her foes into telling the truth is a big concern for any philandering (or golf playing while supposed to be working) Alpha Male. One prolonged touch from “Rogue” leaves a man hovering near death!

And then there’s the costumes. An obvious point of attack which the pictures in the this post have been driving home as you’ve been reading. One look at Power Girl’s enormous breasts would render most, male or female, gay or straight, stunned. What Kryptonite could possibly foil those breasts!? Sure, some will quickly say that the costumes reflect a “male” readership and a “male” authorship; whatever, admit it, the costumes of most female superheroes reflect stereotypes and representations of the worst kind. Would we accept a Black Superhero who used Ebonics or Crack Cocaine to disable his foes and had a costume that barely contained his enormous, engorged, smooth, penis (just imagine seeing almost all of that penis, but its throbbing head)? According to the evidence in this post, sure we would accept it!

Female superheroes are almost always cousins or sisters or kin of some male superhero. Rarely are they generative, rarely do they deal with the contexts so prevalent in male superheroes: marginalization, social insecurity, sexual inadequacies, a need to perform the moral right. All this leaves a lingering issue for comic book fans, one they might not want to admit they have: they’re exclusionary. Both the creators—by representing like they do—and the fans—for accepting and condoning marginalized representations like they do—are putting forward a particular kind of representation whose primary characteristics are exactly those they so deplore and which caused them to withdraw. Comics are hardly open and collaborative; they verge on the offensive in a way that Peter Parker could never conceive (boy, I bet he has a small penis).

In closing, one of the dominant post-superhero modes for comics is undoubtedly the memoir, a narrative form that, for women, seems to come to the fore in response to the male lead of comics authors such as Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, and Will Eisner, all of whom come at the non-superhero comic through memoir. One example of the parallel currents in subject matter or its mode of presentation is Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic in which Bechdel revisits her father’s “lost” history, a narrative perspective used by Spiegelman to great acclaim in Maus. We can only hope that this similar mode—right down to dealing with “fathers” is the beginning of a more symbiotic relationship between women and comics books; one in which they have their own voices and representations beside their male counterparts (or collaborators). However, it does seem as though female writers desperately need to find a voice that screams outside the shadows of male-dominated forms and formats for the comic and character that truly reflect a female voice (whatever might distinguish it) in order to for comics to have any established legitimacy as a primary medium for creative expression in the twenty first century.

#34 Memory and Mimesis: Internal Tension in Sarah Leavitt's Tangles

admin — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 06:23:55 +0000

Sarah Leavitt's graphic memoir, Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer's, My Mother, and Me, looks deceptively simple at first glance. The sparse, line-art images are entirely in black and white, and the framing of each panel is drawn to the required size but the borders are not transgressed. It looks very traditional for a slice-of-life comic. But the joy of Tangles -- and there is joy throughout this difficult, sad, and painful memoir -- comes from the hidden complexity in these images and the nuanced way Leavitt examines her own conflicted feelings through the visual. Though a first glance might suggest that the images in Tangles are secondary to the story, in reality Leavitt's work is so good because of the flawless intermingling of words and images, where the images challenge and belie the words. I think of this as a perfect example of the graphic memoir genre. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Tangles is Sarah Leavitt's memoir of watching her mother succumb to Alzheimer's disease. Intensely personal and honest, Leavitt details her experiences of watching her educated, intelligent mother lose her faculties. She deals openly with the family's early denial, troubles coping, and conflicted feelings of relief. The memoir is, at it's core, a sensitive and moving portrayal of Leavitt's mother, Midge. But it's also a portrait of a family in pain and a daughter in deep flux. There is distance, physical and emotional, between Leavitt and her family. They are in Fredericton while she is in Vancouver. Leavitt's parents are culturally Jewish but do not practice. Though they are liberal, their community is not, and Leavitt must leave Fredericton to discover and embrace her sexuality as a lesbian. (On the other hand, Leavitt's sister becomes more conservative, eventually marrying an Orthodox Jewish man.) These spaces between the characters allow for the reader to examine a series of internal tensions that trouble and define Leavitt's character as depicted in the memoir. As I said before, the images and text are in a constant conversation with one another, and occasionally they seem to disagree. This serves to underscore a central motif in the text: internal tension. Leavitt's character in the text is caught between her desire to help and nurse her mother and her own feelings of impatience with her decline; her desire to disagree with care choices made by her father and sister and her guilt at being the absent daughter; her need to be with her mother and her relief upon each return to Vancouver. There are contrasts throughout that demonstrate these internal tensions, but the one that resonated with me was the depiction of Fredericton. Leavitt's character tells us that Fredericton, as a city, was too small and too confining for her; she had to get out to really find out who she was. And terrible things happen in Fredericton -- Leavitt is cautious about displays of sexuality in the small, conservative city (and indeed, in one harrowing scene, is taunted with calls of "dyke" by local boys who see her holding her ailing mother's hand). These moments are painful. If one read only the words in Tangles, the depiction of Fredericton is wholly negative. And yet with her exquisitely simple style, Leavitt's drawings of Fredericton -- especially the pedestrian bridge and Odell Park -- are disarmingly charming. (Full disclosure: Fredericton was my home for four years. When I read Tangles for the first time, the understated sketch of the pedestrian bridge brought me to tears of homesickness.) The city is not depicted as exclusively negative; these lovely images nuance Leavitt's construction of the town and demonstrate her own ambivalence. While Leavitt's character doesn't consider Fredericton her home, it's clear that she finds something redeeming about the space; this acts as a metaphor for her conflicted feelings about her family and her desire to be with them and with her partner and her life in Vancouver at the same time. Fredericton's ambivalent construction in the text is very much a way to tell the story of Leavitt's character's own ambivalence about the distance that separates her from her family. In this text, Leavitt is also able to work out -- or at least examine -- some of her worst fears about her own likelihood of developing Alzheimer's. Leavitt constructs herself in the memoir as very much the image of the ailing Midge; far more than her sister, Leavitt draws striking physically resemblances throughout the text between herself and her mother through curly hair, fine features, and even posture and body stamp. Leavitt's character repeatedly mentions her own terrible memory, contrasting it to her mother's long-term memory that functions well into the progression of the disease. Leavitt's character works to strengthen her brain by writing with her non-dominant hand and constantly challenging herself; she draws herself in the image of her mother, but seeks to change the future for herself by defying the potential disease state. Here we see the tension between the comforting connection to her mother's image (and repetition in behaviours, such as receiving comfort from her mother as a child and now bestowing comfort on her mother as an adult) and the fear of what that connection may represent. There is more to say about this memoir -- about how Leavitt depicts the love between her parents, about the construction of bodies through illness and the violations we endure, about death and mourning among atheists and agnostics, about ritual, and about identity (who are we when our memories are stripped away from us?) -- and I'll revisit Tangles again here at Graphixia soon. But in the meantime, read it if you haven't. It's painful and heart-wrenching, but also funny, touching, warm, and passionately honest. Leavitt's first foray into graphic memoir really is a triumph.

#35 In Defense of Green Lantern: Why Some Comics Shouldn’t be Movies

admin — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:37:32 +0000

Having just seen the new Green Lantern film starring Ryan Reynolds and having noted the plethora of negative reviews both for the storyline and directing, I’m taking it upon myself to write a defense of the source material – no better time to do it, really, as judging by the movie’s box office gross, it doesn’t appear likely that there will be a sequel. The central concern that most reviewers seem to have is that the movie is too outlandish, the characters are too colourful, the world that the film creates is too unrealistic to invite the mainstay viewer in to participate in the storyline. Loosely translated, the main criticism is that the film comes off as too much like a comic book. Given the success of other recent comic- based films, what is it about Green Lantern that made it fail? It was generally quite faithful to the source material, the acting (while not superb) carried the dialogue, the special effects made the Green Lantern homeworld of Oa spectacular to behold – it truly had all the makings of a successful film. Perhaps the larger question here is, why are some comics easily translatable to winning films while others are clearly not? We can be reminded here of Alan Moore’s prophesy that his much lauded Watchmen was “unfilimable” and that he refused to be involved in the rendering of his story into film, a prognostication that, despite Zack Snyder’s fanatic adherence to the source material, turned out to be quite correct (at least, again, in most critics’ eyes). Green Lantern now has faced a similar problem, having transitioned into a medium that it was never originally conceived for. The history of Green Lantern is incredibly rich and, unlike many of the modern characters who are now enjoying silver screen fame (like Thor, Iron Man and Spider-man) dates back to the Golden Age of comics. The original Green Lantern, Alan Scott, who first appeared very shortly after Superman and Batman in All-American Comics #16 in July of 1940, used a magic lantern fashioned out of a meteorite to fight crime – his adventures were, like the other heroes of the time, based on the dime-store detective fiction of the previous decade with the twist of costumes and powers, and the crimes that he fought against were entirely terrestrial in nature. The character received his own title and moderate popularity, but he was ultimately unsuccessful and did not survive into the Silver Age (though in the Modern Age he has since been rebooted and is currently a member of the Justice Society of America). Hungry for new ideas to counter its relatively recent competitor Marvel at the start of the Silver Age, DC decided to revamp Green Lantern in an entirely different direction. Crafted by Gil Kane, Hal Jordan, making his first appearance in Showcase #22 in October 1959, was the recipient of a ring from an alien named Abin Sur (for those who have seen the film, the basic origin plot is generally the same in this first issue). Oa and the development of the Green Lantern Corps, however, are only hinted at in these first few appearances in Showcase, with the character developing more slowly than what we see in Spider-man and Superman, for example – the Guardians do not appear until the character received his own series, despite having made contact with him in Showcase #23, and the rest of the Corps only came into being as the character’s solo title progressed. Much like in the Golden Age, the Silver Age Green Lantern was not a popular character, and his title came very close to cancellation – it had transitioned to a general science-fiction title, and its artists were generally subpar compared to DC’s other then-current titles. This prompted the editors of DC to hand the character over to Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams in a last ditch attempt to save the title. Often considered the start of the Bronze Age of comics, the duo’s run on the title (beginning with issue #76) brought the character back to Earth and had Green Lantern wrestling with complex social issues for what is arguably the first time in comics’ history to that point. Green Lantern, paired with Green Arrow for the run, faced problems like racism, religious fanaticism, the pervasiveness of media, the destructive nature of capitalism and even Green Arrow’s sidekick, Speedy, wrestling with heroin addiction. The contrast here to the Green Lantern invested in the politics of Oa and space adventures is almost as great a contrast as Alan Scott was to Hal Jordan – here, we are presented with a socially conscious character that is fully grounded in the problems of his own world, ushering the comics’ reader into thinking more diversely during their reading experience. Scholars have since pointed to the run as being a sea-change in the way that comics were conceived, acknowledging that for the first time the medium was acknowledged as being able to carry explicitly complex, value laden original stories, integrating complex moral struggles with elements of the fantastic. O’Neil and Adams’ run on Green Lantern was short, lasting only until issue #89; the title went on hiatus directly after, and it did not see publication again until 1977. From here, we once again encounter the outer space exploits with the universe that Green Lantern operates in becoming incredibly diverse and filled with a multitude of alien species, interstellar wars and the complex workings of the Green Lantern Corps itself – beyond this, for consistency and relevance to the publishing line as a whole, Hal Jordan interacted with the mainstay characters of the DCU on a semi-regular basis, being a member of the Justice League and appearing in others’ solo titles as well. Green Lantern was eventually retitled Green Lantern Corps, cancelled and rebooted again as Green Lantern #1 in 1989, a series which ran for 181 issues. During this time, we have been introduced to many other Green Lanterns, including Kyle Rayner, Guy Gardner and John Stewart, each of whom many readers identify as their “favorite.” It has since been restarted by Geoff Johns with Green Lantern: Rebirth and, because of the author’s highly innovative reworking of Green Lantern history in regards to the emotional colour spectrum of the power rings and the expansion of the Green Lantern universe as a whole, the character is now one of DC’s “A-Listers,” sometimes outselling long-standing titles like Action and Detective. The most recent DC company-wide events have been based on the character, being Blackest Night and the Sinestro Corps War, and the three current Green Lantern titles are consistently in the ranks of DC’s top selling books. We’ve written before here about the fact that the comic world can often be ostracizing to the outsider; this is ironic, as the titles and characters often speak to the disenfranchised with the fantastic stories of power and control over one’s environment, offering an out for the Sartrean suffering that comes from negative events that occur outside of our personal spheres (though this could really be the allure of fictional worlds in general). With characters like Green Lantern, the reader is not addressing a platonic archetype as he is in Superman, Batman and Spider-man; as my far from comprehensive outlining of Green Lantern’s history shows, we have a character who has seen many different incarnations over several decades of writers, operating in as complex and nuanced a universe as comicdom offers. The appeal of Green Lantern and the current success of his title stems from this experienced evolution of his character and his environment, with readers drawn into the highly detailed and closely read world of multiple authors’ imaginings – it is not so much the character himself who is successful (Hal Jordan wasn’t even Earth’s Green Lantern for most of the 90’s) but the larger scope of the rich mosaic of storyarcs that have led to his current incarnation. One could argue that DC took a misstep in failing to recognize this, that archetypal characters are always those that are most successful because they can be related more easily to events off of the screen. Green Lantern achieved prominence in the superhero genre while operating outside of this dictum, taking many years to become popular and only when his personal universe developed a consistency and depth that most other heroes are never challenged by. While one could certainly argue (as I have myself) that all of the characters who have lived through the Golden Age to present are multiauthored constructions that are dynamic and shifting, demanding close reading to develop a full understanding of their characters, none are so dependent upon this type of reading as Green Lantern. This image below can give you an idea of the expansiveness of the universe that has been created in the many Green Lantern series over the decades: Film demands certain traits of its comic book franchises – there must be a comprehensive origin story, a relatable character, a self contained plot and a world that is fully explained through the lens of the reality in which we normally operate (we can see this even in Marvel’s recent Thor, where the Asgardian God was explained away as being a potential alien, his rainbow from the heavens being an Einstein-Rosen bridge). In short, comic book movies are expected to not be comic book movies; instead of acknowledging the complex histories of the characters they address and incorporating a copious dependence on suspension of reality, they anticipate no foreknowledge of the character and attempt to offer condensed versions of characters for single-serving consumption. Again, while this is acceptable for archetypes, Green Lantern is not this kind of character. He is, instead, a very “comic-book” character who relies on readers who have not only familiarized themselves with the details of his universe but who have come to accept him, over time, for all the conflicts his reality has with our own. Attempting to condense this kind of history into a single package could not help but be unsuccessful as, returning to Watchmen, Alan Moore knew about his own work. In a similar way, Watchmen relied on the close reading of its audience in relation to the superhero genre as a whole – his work was successful because it mocked superhero archetypes by humanizing and thereby corrupting them, requiring this familiarity in order to carry the breadth of its message. Green Lantern, and the other characters like him (though they are few), similarly demands a perspective that is familiar with the way that comics operate as a running saga that is complex and varied, that is not immediately consumable and dispensed with. When the movie attempts to collapse this history and turn the richness of the Green Lantern Universe into a single two hour film, it does a disservice to what made Green Lantern an asset to the DCU in the first place. The reviews that state that the movie is too much like a comic book are indeed accurate and are telling in that they highlight the fact that certain titles in the medium do have an essential element that make them successful here and nowhere else. The stories and histories of Green Lantern are worth reading because of their complexity, and perhaps the relative failure of the film that unsuccessfully attempted to condense this dynamic and continuously evolving space only serves to emphasize the positive qualities of the character in his original home.

#36 Pornography and Comics

admin — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 07:22:44 +0000

We've discussed the relationship between comics and mimesis, temporality, identity, continuity, and a whole slew of other categories. In fact, the basis for our continuing engagement with comic books is an underlying, preconceived, agreement that comics deserve critical scrutiny that reflects the complicated subjects and themes comics themselves engage with. That said, our criticism of comics relies--like all forms of criticism--on analytical frameworks borrowed from other methodologies--literary criticism, film criticism, and other modes such as social critique and philosophical interrogations (post-structuralism!). And while this approach to the criticism of comics is all well, and good, it belies its own undercurrent of elitism, exclusion, and preconception. In other words, we take the critique of comics seriously only for those comics that take themselves seriously or, those comics that imply they take themselves and their subject seriously as a medium for expression. There's always room for a joke, irony, and liminality without plunging the whole exercise into the toilet as "inauthentic" or "inane," but we tend to critique on the basis of a set of--with apologies to Woody Allen--aesthetic criteria that prioritize "serious" subjects, re-imaginings, or themes. Our reluctance to move out of the "serious artist / critic" mode, suggests there are areas where comics are "representing" that need critical attention, if only to account for the dearth of socio-cultural subjects comics represent in the twenty first century. And one of those subjects in need of attention is the relationship between comics and pornography. Pornography in comic books occupies an odd "middest" position (credit to Frank Kermode) somewhere between credibly realistic--it does "show" anatomical features in a way literary pornography cannot--and comically awkward--it doesn't "show" anatomical features in way that film or video can. Like every other kind of comic book representation, pornographic comics represent a hybrid between realism and fiction that is both self-evident and cloaked in a web of integrative connections between text, context, and image. If we take for granted that Umberto Eco is correct and comics are “inconsumable” in that they cannot occupy a fixed place in time but rather occupy a constantly recurring present in which the circumstances change only tangentially, then the connection between superhero comics and pornography is almost a formality. Just like a viewer of pornography, the comic book reader can predict how the narrative will develop, its signature moments, key manoeuvres, all leading to the proverbial “money shot” in which all anxieties are released and the action hero retreats back into daily life. As we’ve discussed in the posts of Graphixia before, even the narratives of non-superhero comics follow a particular trajectory around memory, identity, and awakenings that reflect the inconsumable dimensions of the superhero comic. It’s not so much that comics are like pornography; it’s that they enact the same narrative techniques and rely on fulfilling a similar set of expectations in the reader. Everyone knows what they’re getting and everyone's secretly--or openly--happy about that fact. Of course, inevitable will be the pointing to artists such as Robert Crumb, who seem to embrace rather than resist the pornographic pretense to comic books. However, Crumb participates in the long line of comic book illustrators who reconfigure superhero tropes in other contexts. There’s no question that Crumb’s artwork is closer to being labelled pornographic at face value than the textual analysis needed to deconstruct pornographic layers in a Spider-Man comic. However, Crumb’s story-lines always enact the superhero fantasy of coming out of one’s shell and performing super-heroic acts. Indeed, Crumb’s work is a helpful bridge between the super-heroic of fantasy and the super-heroic of, well, fantasy. Superman might be restricted to fighting crime, but Crumb’s crude supermen perform sexually in a superhuman way. Pornography is full of super-humanity, real and fake. It’s also full of costume and shifting identities. In fact, pornography and comics are ridiculously alike. They both enact a fantasy of everyday life that allows for escape, mimesis, memory. Everyone is just "minding their own business” until something happens and one is given an opportunity to do, and be, otherwise. We always fast-forward through the constant re-telling of origin stories, but we need them to be there; it's part of the experience of recognition (cue lame synth music: bowm. bowm. chicka-bown. preeeummm. bowm). There’s a lot of comics—long and short form—out there that are strictly pornography. It’s not all about memoir, history, superheroes; or maybe it is. See, that’s the thing. Comics, no matter what they represent, play for the same comfort zones as pornography, and they always have. The first "re-writes" of comics characters were in the infamous "Tijuana Bibles" that took famous characters from newspaper strips and put them into pornographic story-lines: Blondie unapologetically riding Dagwood moaning about his over-sized cock, or Dick Tracey showing his engorged first name to a nude, wide-eyed, dilated-pupil Little Orphan Annie. Long before Moore and Miller, artists were reframing superheroes and others in updated and “more realistic” contexts, and they were doing it pornographically--maybe the “unliterary” is influence.

#36 What if Archie Killed Veronica? Criminal: The Last of the Innocent #1

admin — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 22:10:35 +0000

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' Criminal: The Last of the Innocent #1 transforms the crime comic book into a metafictional (metacomical?) reflection on how comics create meaning. Brubaker and Phillips perform this transformation by incorporating two distinct comics styles, gritty crime comic and “Archie” pastiche, to reflect on temporality, memory, and, ultimately, death. Comics, they suggest, are about our relationship to death and our efforts to repress it as the telos of our everyday existence. They exploit the structure of comics as a sequence of panels each of which “freezes” a moment of action or contemplation. This is not the first time that Brubaker and Philips have interposed a radically different comics style in their narratives. In the first series of Criminal, Brubaker and Phillips embedded a newspaper detective comic strip, "Frank Kafka, Private Eye" as an absurdist counterpoint to the gritty main story. That newspaper strip interrupts the conventions of the genre, suggesting that what we take as "realism" in the main story is really just a style or mode, just like "Dick Tracy," say. We are reminded of Roland Barthes’ “reality effect” from The Pleasure of the Text. The message is that comics create, rather than represent, a world. And because that world is a sequence of static images, slipping images from other styles or modes into the mix is relatively simple. Usually, a comic maintains a "look" that the artist does not deviate from so that there is continuity from frame to frame. Some comics artists, however, like Jessica Alba, in La Perdida, or Jason Lutes, in Berlin, will change the facial structure of their characters occasionally from frame to frame so that they are more like a “realistic” drawing than a “caricatured” cartoon. Allison Bechdel, in Fun Home, draws characters in photographs so that they contrast with her typical representation of them. But none of these shifts is as radical those in The Last of the Innocent. Like many comics, The Last of the Innocent is structured around binarisms: present and past; city and country; crime comic and “Archie” comic. The first terms in these pairs appear in Phillips' typical style: black lined panels, lots of charcoal pencil effects and chiaroscuro. The second terms, however, appear in clean, flat, four-colour mode with nary a shadow to be seen, just like an Archie comic, with the small town of "Brookview" standing in for "Riverdale." Our reading experience is one of radical alterity. In fact, the first time the style switched, I thought panels from a different comic book had been spliced into my copy. In Last of the Innocent, the idyllic past of the small town bleeds into the "criminal" present of the city, so that the conventions of Archie-world give way to those of the crime comic. The allusiveness of the Brookview panels is not difficult to figure out. "Freakout" is "Jughead" and there's a soda shop. The back story for Riley Richards includes a Betty and Veronica struggle over his affections between Felicity and Lizzie. Riley moves to the city and marries the rich girl "Felix," while Lizzie and Freakout remain in Brookview. But the point of the narrative is not simply to spot the connections. Rather, the idea is that the stable, unchanging world of the Archie comic be submitted to time and death. Felicity cheats on Riley with the Reggie Mantle character and Riley decides to to kill her. The effect is exactly what Freud called "the Unheimlich" or "the uncanny;" something all too familiar is recast as unfamiliar and frightening. The Archie comic represents a world untouched by time, a "Grecian Urn" type of space in which Archie is caught in a love triangle of infinite variations but without resolution or development [1]. The crime story, on the other hand, deals with the transitory and fragile nature of life. The genre is all about the death that is missing from the Archie comic, presented as a sublime thrill. It is difficult to imagine the readerships of the two types of comic overlapping because they represent such opposite visions of the world. The crime comic is one realm of the comics world where continuity does not play much of a role because the characters tend to die; and unlike superheroes they tend not to come back to life. Submitting the world of Archie to that of the crime comic so that “Archie” plots the death of “Veronica” ironizes the little world of Riverdale/Brookview where she has always been trapped in a kind of living death. Innocence, of the type that Archie comics represent, is the same double phenomenon that appears in Keats' poem: the price of eternal youth is to be frozen in time, or, say, stuck in a comic book. The uncanny moment of The Last of the Innocent comes when we understand the relationship between the two kinds of comics world deaths: the murder of the crime comic that violates the quotidian cycle of existence and its expectations and the "living death" of a world where nothing changes in a meaningful way. What these deaths repress is death like that which comes from Riley's father's stomach cancer, a death that is neither exciting nor preventable. Most of us will not murder or be murdered, and none of us will live forever in Riverdale/Brookview. The real familiarity that the Archie comic and the ordinary crime comic seek to repress is the inevitable and probably quite boring death that most of us will face in spite of our efforts to forestall it. The final lines of Keat's ode: 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.' thinly veil the real capping statement of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and Criminal: The Last of the Innocent: We are all going to die. The unmoving picture of the comic book, Archie or otherwise, testifies to this inevitability as much as it might try to repress it. Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips take the brave step of exposing this unfortunate truth. [1] Life with Archie introduced transformation to Riverdale with Archie marrying Veronica. Last of the Innocent includes a "Life with Riley" segment as an allusion.

#38 Scott Pilgrim World 1, Level 1 (Book 1): Canadian, eh?

admin — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 19:31:26 +0000

This post was delayed on account of cat injury / illness. It was almost a detailed play-by-play of administering anti-inflammatories to an angry cat, but that post will eventually be a graphic narrative all its own: Tales of a Broken Tail. But cats -- the internet's favourite animal -- give a prime segue into the internet's other favourite thing: Scott Pilgrim. Yes, that's right -- a blog post, on the internet, about Scott Pilgrim. And it's not even 2009! Amazing. When I first moved to Vancouver, I had an experience at a comic book shop that chilled me to the core. I asked the head nerd if he could recommend me some Canadian titles to check out -- slice of life or otherwise, I wasn't picky; just looking for some new CanCon because I like graphic narratives and I teach Canadian literature and I like to teach graphic narratives in my Canadian literature classes.

Me: What can you recommend in terms of recent Canadian graphic narratives? [caption id="attachment_729" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Artist's Rendition of Head Nerd"][/caption] Head Nerd: There aren't any. Me: *stunned silence* Head Nerd: Yeah, Canadians just don't write graphic stuff. Me: *quiet aneurysm* Head Nerd: I guess maybe Scott Pilgrim. But that barely counts. Bryan Lee O'Malley doesn't even live in Canada anymore.

When I regained consciousness, I set about finding a different comic shop to frequent. But it foregrounded a couple of issues for me:

Are Canadian comic readers unaware of Canadian cultural output in this realm?
What makes something Canadian?

I won't try to cover #2, since a PhD in CanLit and countless essays from students has not yet illuminated this for me. I'll touch on some aspects, though. #1, however, makes me wonder. I was pleased when Essex County was selected for Canada Reads last year, because I think Canada Reads usually does a good job of demonstrating what middlebrow literature consumers are in to, and it was nice to see graphic narrative represented there for the first time (even if the debates around it were troubling). But what is the awareness of Canadian graphic novels and narratives generally? Will a Sarah Leavitt ever have the cultural cache of a Miriam Toewes? Does it matter? Do people know that Kill Shakespeare is Canadian when they pick it up? Do they care? Because CanLit is my thing, I try to use my non-themed posts here at Graphixia to talk about Canadian titles -- it hasn't been conscious, really, up to now, but it will be from here on out. And I'm going to start with the first of a series of posts about Scott Pilgrim, because I think in interesting ways Bryan Lee O'Malley is actually very interested in carving out a specifically Canadian space in the world of graphic narratives. And also because the series is freaking awesome -- which the internet could already tell you, of course. bread makes you fat?! Volume One of the Scott Pilgrim saga, Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life sets up the basic premise of the series: Scott Pilgrim is a slacker who plays in a crappy band and mooches off his best friend and dates high school girls and just generally kind of herp derps his way through life. Until he meets Ramona Flowers, who magic-pixie-dream-girls his heart. But she's going to make him work for it -- she has seven evil exes, and to be her boyfriend, Scott Pilgrim will have to defeat them all. If you saw the movie trailer, you know the plot. [caption id="" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="note Ontario logo on his tee"][/caption] But the graphic novel also sets up a very specifically Canadian space for the narrative to unfold. This is not a Canadian city posing as Anycity, USA -- this is Toronto, complete with accurate street and place references (Tourism Toronto even wants you to take the Scott Pilgrim tour of the city). In a class on the text, I had students catalogue all the minute Canadian details -- from use of "eh" to images of Canadian currency to brands like Molson and Labatts -- and respond to it. Many students liked that something so full of Canadian in-jokes and reference points was so popular outside of Canada; that indeed Bryan Lee O'Malley's international success suggested a legitimacy for these cultural reference points that they particularly appreciated. (The eternal need for such legitimacy is Canadian in and of itself, of course.) Critics have argued that Scott Pilgrim's underdog-done-good narrative is a particularly Canadian rendition of the superhero saga, and I like that reading but I'm not sure it holds up -- the formula of slacker-turned-hero is not a Canadian invention nor particularly special Canadian terrain. But that it is read this way is important to an understanding of how Canadians perceive ourselves, and why we like these moments of "American noticed us!" I think the more important contribution of a text like Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life -- particularly given its international success and popularity -- is that it uses Canadian space-and-place as significantly interesting haunts for superhero stories. It does so with great self-awareness (the frame-by-frame packing in of Canadian reference points suggests this) and a sense of purpose. O'Malley is telling an entertaining story first and foremost, but his desire to locate and frame it within a Canadian (and specifically Torontonian) series of cultural reference points is important to developing and nurturing a larger conversation about Canadian graphic narratives more generally. Next month, I'll talk more about the story itself, with a particular eye to the way gender is represented in the Scott Pilgrim saga.

#40 Dying All the Time: Daytripper

admin — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:31:17 +0000

Daytripper by Brazilian twin brothers Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá does a number of things that should doom a comic to failure. First of all it’s gimmicky: at the end of each issue the main character, Bras de Oliva Domingos, dies. Furthermore, when we first meet him in issue #1, he’s an obituary writer. So he’s a guy who writes about other people’s deaths and then dies himself. Second, Daytripper is as sentimental as all get out. Bras’ deaths terminate stories about relationships with women, his father, his best friend, his mother, and so on. Each of his deaths has a distinct emotional impact hooked to the specific relationship he has with different characters. The sentimentality of Daytripper is part of its charm, however, and the art reinforces it. Bras has a sweet, hang dog kind of look. He is kind and thoughtful. There is nothing anti-hero about him. He loves his dog, his wife, and his child. He has a good friendship with a co-worker at the paper. Offsetting obvious ironies and sentimentality is the way that the deaths are not in chronological sequence; the issues jump around. Readers are thus invited to find patterns other than chronology to interpret the sequence, like relationship vectors, for instance. One pattern is that characters tend to appear in the issue previous to the one in which they play a key role in some aspect of Bras’ life. We ask, what would it mean if he died now? or now? or now? And when he appears again in the next issue, perhaps older, perhaps younger, we get a sense of cheating death and cheating at the rules of narrative trajectory. If the horizon of death lures us through stories as the ultimate telos, Daytripper screws with that notion, presenting trajectories that would look like an airline’s map of destinations. Of course, writing obituaries is not what Bras aspires to; he would rather be a successful writer like his father. Perhaps the only negative emotion Bras shows is a kind of resentment towards his father’s fame. In the first issue, Bras’ dissatisfaction with being an obituary writer is set against a state celebration of his father’s accomplishments. Eventually he achieves success as a writer, writing a rather hideously titled novel called Silken Eyes. But “success” comes to mean many things: being a good son, father, husband, friend. Those who read the whole series will find that the anticipation of Bras’ death in each issue becomes something of a joke: “I wonder how he’s gonna get it this time." Issue #3 even jokes about its own narrative strategy. Bras’ friend Jorge mimics the closing of each issue when he says that Bras has died of a broken heart: “Thing is...nobody told Bras he was dead, so he showed up for work anyway." This gimmick does achieve its aim of making us contemplate the fragility of life through giving Bras multiple deaths, as if he were a cat. What if Bras were to “really” die in issue #1 in which his father gets a state tribute for his contribution to Brazilian Letters, and Bras is a mere newspaper obituary writer? What if he were to die as a child during a family visit to his grandparents’ farm? In each case, the telos of the story makes us reconstruct the life that leads up to it. If Criminal: The Last of the Innocent is about the relationship between murder and innocence, Daytripper is about how death frames our everyday existence. It could happen now, now, now. So each moment moment of pleasure or insight is somehow stolen from death. As Bras’ father says, “Life is made of such moments, son. Relationships are based on such moments, such choices, such actions...” The final moment of death is the end point of many moments of pleasure and insight, of life. For each of us, Bras’ father says, one moment of life stands above all the rest. And this moment is the moment of death’s counterpart. For example, when Bras meets his wife to be in a grocery store/ coffee shop, the moment is as accidental as the moments throughout the series that cause his death. In that issue, Bras dies when he is struck by a delivery truck as he runs back to tell the woman about his feelings. But the story cheats death when he shows up married to her in the next issue. As superheroes show us time and again, comics is a medium whose characters die and come back to life over and over again. Daytripper turns that gesture into a reflection on what life means.

#41 Scott Pilgrim Episode 2: Manic Pixie Dream Girl

admin — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 18:31:58 +0000

In this second post about Scott Pilgrim (you can read the first one here), I'm going to focus on Ramona and her role in the series as a perfect example of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (though Bryan Lee O'Malley plays with this convention to a certain extent). A Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG), if you're not familiar with the term, is a common stock character particularly popular in the boy-centric genres of graphic narratives, hipster indie films, and video games. The term was coined by Nathan Rabin in a review of the film Elizabethtown written for the Onion AV Club in 2007. (The same publication later put together a list of MPDGs, available here.) MPDGs exist as static characters -- quirky and adorable, eccentric and girly, they are different from other girls in the life of our male protagonist, and they exist solely to teach him about life and change how he thinks about the world. These are profound, transformative figures. They just, you know, don't get to have motivations, goals, or intentions of their own. Because they're too busy being profoundly eccentric and adorable. Think Natalie Portman in Garden State; the character only functions to redefine Zach Braff's sad slacker life. Indeed, the important counterpoint to the MPDG is the man-child protagonist; a protagonist who is content in life and functional in society is not ripe for transformation and thus not primed for the MPDG experience. The MPDG will move on to another sad, aimless slacker (chicks dig those, right?) and there will be no sleeper indie hit. And here, Scott Pilgrim is our man-child. And Ramona Flowers is our Manic Pixie Dream Girl. The problem with the MPDG, of course, is that she isn't an agent in her own life. She exists solely to make a better man of the protagonist; through her whimsy and beauty, she helps him find his focus and set goals for his life. She's can't afford to be multidimensional because her task is singular. So all MPDGs end up being the same. In the Scott Pilgrim series, though, much of the archetypal issues around MPDG characters are right on the surface. Ramona puts the "dream" in MPDG by having intercessory powers -- she is a connection between Scott's sleeping and waking world, interacting with his dream state. She enacts the "magic" and "pixie" aspects through kicking off this supernatural, otherworldly battle-of-the-exes chaos that frames the series. She's quirky -- she listens to little-known bands, has an outsider (really American) perspective on Scott's world, and she engages with the universe on roller skates and while wearing goggles. She's sweetly unique. And she does motivate change in Scott, though Scott is so non-functional that it seems impossible that she wouldn't. She motivates his central quest -- the slaying of the evil exes -- but she also inspires him to write (terrible) music. Because he's Scott, he isn't immediately motivated to change his living or employment situations, but he is motivated to lie to her about these changes. And crucially, she lacks the agency of a more fully-developed female character, which is part of what makes her so clearly a MPDG foil to Scott. She is never present at the battles of the exes, never fighting for her own freedom from this cycle but instead content to allow Scott to intercede. This is because ultimately, though the battles with the exes are framed around winning Ramona's love (interesting given that for much of the story Ramona's interest in Scott seems to be benevolent mild attraction rather than love), the quest is really a metaphor for Scott's own insecurities. Through battling the exes, he is not winning Ramona's love but freeing himself from a life of passive disinterest -- and ultimately triumphing over the heartbreak surrounding Envy Adams. Scott's intense loser-i-ness really suggests to me, however, that O'Malley is at least aware of the stock characters he has tapped in to and is playing with them a little. For example, the "music" Scott is inspired to write by Ramona is comically bad: [youtube_video id="lmQmM2wva5Q"] The suggestion seems to be here that even the manickiest, most pixieful dream girl cannot fix the brilliant mess that is Scott Pilgrim overnight. Next time: masculinity and the role of fighting in the Scott Pilgrim universe.

#42 Pecs and Pipes, or Why Comics Rock

admin — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 18:29:33 +0000

One of the standard complaints about the superhero genre of comic books is that the female form is grossly exaggerated, highly sexualized and, most often, presented as scantily clad as possible. The concern, typically, is that these characters are often two dimensional and set a standard of unrealistic expectations for the predominantly male readership, and they have the added effect of ostracizing female readers who are disturbed by the common trope of the oversized breasts, undersized waists and jutting hips that are the norm for women in comics. What often goes unaddressed, however, is that this hyper-sexuality and exaggeration of form is just as prevalent (if not moreso) for the male heroes and their sidekicks in comics as well. The male form, presented with swollen pectorals, washboard abs and tree-trunk quads, is arguably just as unattainable an ideal, yet the presentation receives little to no complaint, nor is it commonly branded as purely homoerotic despite comics’ predominantly male readership. Why is this the case? Comics have a long history of presenting characters in a highly sexualized way, from the earliest images of thick-eyelashed, wide-hipped Mary Jane Watson / Parker to the chiseled jaw and powerful form of Bruce Wayne, and over the seventy-plus years of mass-market superhero comics, little has changed in these representations. The idealistic bodies we are offered in comics, both male and female, are now an expectation for readers, and not seeing this physical shape on our heroes and their counterparts would now be a shock in the medium. There have certainly been exceptions to this rule, however, but they have come not from the superhero genre but more heady, academic fare such as Dave Sim’s “Cerebus,” Terry Moore’s “Strangers in Paradise” and the various imprints of the “Big Two” – Marvel and DC – that have been branded as being marketed towards mature readers because of more advanced thematic content. The fact remains that superhero comics are sexist, both from a feminist as well as a masculinist standpoint. Or are they? Perhaps, given the decibel level of the complaints from gender theorists towards the exaggerated female form in comics, we have yet to acknowledge that there may be more to the derogatory labels than is readily noticed at first glance. Firstly, and even more basely than arguing that comics are essentially soft-core pornography, the hyper-sexualized form is easier for an artist to draw. Anyone who has taken first-year anatomy first learns the muscle structures underneath however many layers of girth we add onto it, and this is presented as the simple ideal – readily available and standardized, easy to sketch out almost blindly to the tune of twenty-two pages a month. Spandex allows the artist to dispense with the folds and lines of clothes and the individualized nuances of parcels of scattered fat, as he recalls the base model which he is drawing; the expectation for the superhero artist is predictability of the familiar physical body and, more importantly, a speedy delivery of his or her work. The logistics are clean and simple: deliver what you’ve been taught, and make sure it’s on time. One can see the application of this in even the earliest Superman and Spider-man comics – there is no need, given these heroes’ powers, for them to be bulky and sexualized. Superman’s powers are fueled by the sun, not by his musculature, and Spider-man by his radioactive blood, not by his lean frame. The fact remains that these male characters, and all others like them, are presented with exaggerated physical forms and a body fat content in the very low single digits. This first point, however, is too easy an out – many comics’ artists, such as Frank Quitely and John Cassaday, attempt to break this mold on a regular basis, giving us heroes who are more “realistic” in their representation of the human form, as they spend vast amounts of time – resulting in frequent delays of books – in order to present their craft as something other than simple mimicry. More important than the simple logistics of the industry and the turnaround time for the artist trying to fill pages is the fact that these are our heroes, bastions of virtue and standards for moral good. The superhero genre is populated predominantly by characters who understand the world in terms of black and white, of a simple good versus evil binary that requires a standardized justice to be dispensed to maintain. We look to them, both as children and as adults, with expectation on how to act when faced with difficult or morally challenging encounters – it must be remembered that comics were, at first, a pedagogical tool in order to distribute the classics in a more accessible way. It is hardly surprising then that these heroes, who are paradigms of virtue and who are often very unrealistic in terms of their morally definitive nature are also paradigms of the physical form. These heroes, male and female, make moral choices that most of us are incapable of making, from patrolling the streets to ensure that justice is being meted out against those who would do society wrong, to sacrificing the completeness of the individual private life for a greater sense of the common good. We turn to these heroes at an early age for pedagogical examples on the platonic form of how to behave, of the essential nature of moral certitude; this applies not only to the male characters of Superman and Batman, but to the proud and equally powerful female characters of Wonder Woman and Power Girl. Why then would the content not be expressed outwardly in their forms? These heroes are our ideals in a moral sense, as we aspire to have the courage to make the same choices they do when in their monthly difficult circumstances – their bodies are, predictably, also presented as ideals, just as platonic and unattainable as their ability to choose good over evil at every turn. The ripped chests and swelled breasts of our heroes are not meant to ostracize or alienate, but to show us that these characters are meant to be aspired to. Their outward appearance, both for males and females, is only as exaggerated as the binaristic perspectives they hold on right and wrong. The stories presented in the superhero genre of comic books are fantastic, meant to entertain and draw us in to an idealized representation of the world in which evil is readily identifiable as such, and good is always present to be able to confront it head on. The stories themselves are exaggerations of expectation, are emphasized versions of the encounters we face in our lives that remind us of the importance of our choices. The exaggerated bodies of our heroes, present even when dialogue is not, reflect the idyllic nature of their characters and remind us that, however unattainable, we should be pursuing these ideals in our every action. The hyper-sexualized male form and its female counterpart, then, are images of what society at large (reflected in the artists’ renderings) suggests that we should aspire to even if these ideals are impossible to achieve. It is a testament to our age, for good or for ill, that we find idealistic representations contemptible – one does not see these offenses taken in Greek sculpture or renaissance painting. Instead of platonic representations through which we can aspire, we are distracted (and perhaps limited) by ambiguity and synthesis. In recognizing the medium of the comic book and the superhero genre, one might apply the same logic here that Aristotle prescribes to art more generally: “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance, and this, and not the external manner and detail, is true reality.”

#43 There Are No Words, but...

admin — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:16:22 +0000

In our discussions about comics, we've tended to orbit around superheroes, post-war graphic "novels," and the way these comic books are reflected and received in popular culture. So let's call this post a "serious turn." What hasn't been covered up to now, and it's a big oversight, is the woodcut novel. The woodcut novel, a kin of William Blake's illuminating printing, etching on copper plates, in this instance refers to a "wordless" novel made up of a sequence of images produced by etching onto plates of wood (or linoleum, metal, rubber, etc.) in relief (like, backwards). These "wordless" graphic novels--and they truly are "graphic" novels, made up of long, complex narratives that rely solely on the image sequence to covey the plot of the story--tend to build on religious or epic narratives. Their stories are about rises and downfalls, the perils of sin, but also of social justice, anxieties about technology, mechanization, dehumanization, and mass production. In fact, they tend to deal with these subjects in a less latent way than comic books do now. The woodcuts require a deep engagement with the image and thus do not need to rely on the interpretations of Captain America's runaway capitalism, or Fantastic Four's technological dehumanization, or Spiderman's atomic anxieties. Instead, the reader must work to create her own words from the etchings on the page, creating a story that is at once the author's, but as much the reader's, for she is deeply invested in the politics of its making. One of the best known artists in the medium (or genre as long as we're talking comic books) is Lynd Ward (if your into it: The Library of America just published a handsome two volume set of his most popular woodcut novels). The picture above is fairly representative of his work and hints at the prevalence of the detailed lines, and careful crafting that went into it. While he cannot be credited with inventing the format--that honour probably goes to Frans Mesereel, but I'm just spitballing--he can certainly be credited as its most popular purveyor. The list of comic book artists indebted to Ward's woodcuts (and the etchings of others, such as Masereel and Laurence Hyde) is long: Art Spiegelman, Will Eisner, George Herriman, Marjane Starapi, Jason Lutes, Joe Sacco, Seth, all have a style that reflects the lines, scratches, and scrapes of woodcut artists. Once you've feasted on a few woodcut novels, it's hard to read any black and white comic book out there without recalling the work of early woodcut artists such as Ward and Masereel. In his introduction to Ward's collected works, Art Spiegelman notes, as he walks through a gallery show of Ward's work, "I remember slowing down to notice that a number of the prints on display depicted trees and forests. I thought about the poetry of patiently carving into a dead tree to make a print on paper that commemorated the once living thing" (xxv). That's a perceptive comment from Spiegelman, as usual. Given that woodcut novels tend toward stories about depression-era anxieties about labour, social justice, runaway consumption, and the dehumanizing effect of the corporate industrial complex, the process of their creation is worth careful consideration. First of all, it's a different process than anything we normally associate with modern comic book production. No sketchbooks, or inkers, or colourists, only an artist using a graver (or burin) painstakingly (and I imagine there were several painful moments when the burin slipped, gashing a finger or two) carving lines in a block of wood or linoleum.

The move to produce woodcuts looks like a calculated response to the anxieties mentioned above. It seems to offer a riposte to modes of mass production, and the loss of a tactile connection to the goods we produce. It's certainly a different perspective on mass production, one that in itself gave rise to the modern, disposable, drugstore comic book. The etched block can be placed directly in the printing press, or inked up, and rolled out onto pages, then stitched to together by hand. It's quite literally "hand-crafted" and always so, even if it is then mass-produced on the printing press. One of the most interesting things about woodcut images for me, is the dominance of black. It's the first thing that strikes me when I encounter a woodcut--the black. Quite simply, because of the effort that must be made to produce whitespace in relief etching (the white space is the carved out part of the block because it does not hold the ink), blacks tend to dominate the images. This feature is even more evident when the reader returns to images created with the pen or pencil. The whitespace leaps out and seems deserted and overly bright in contrast with the deep, dark, overwhelming blacks of woodcuts. The image above is from Milt Gross' He Done Her Wrong (subtitled "The Great American Novel (with no words)). Itself a "wordless novel," and a funny, well-rendered one at that, the whitespace frees things up and in fact makes it funny. There's rarely anything funny about the woodcut novel (especially in the Ward, Giacomo Patri, Masereel tradition) because the blacks overwhelm the page and make it claustrophobic, dark, depressing. All this to say that the comic genre yields so much of its interpretive power to the image itself, the way it is constructed, it's use of shadow and line, that the mode of its production (burin or pen) is essential and reflected in its reception. As George A. Walker tells us the woodcut "is often referred to as the art of the white line because it is a subtractive process that works from black to white. To make a black line the artist must carve two white lines, since the wood must be removed from both sides of the line that is to print" (15). Whereas, with the pen, the process is additive, with the pen filling the whitespace with lines. The juxtaposition of these two styles of graphic storytelling is a rich source for interpretation and inspiration. In the end, a "serious turn" suggests that the woodcut comic book is just a damn good way to spend an afternoon; it reveals itself slowly but yields a lasting impression (Groucho Marx eyebrow twitch...). Lynd Ward plates can be found here. Cites: Walker, George A., ed. Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels. Buffalo: Firefly, 2007. Spiegelman, Art, ed. Lynd Ward: Volume I; God's Man, Madman's Drum, Wild Pilgrimage. New York: Penguin / Library of America, 2010. Gross, Milt. He Done Her Wrong: The Great American Novel (with no words). Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2005.

#44 Inaction Comics

admin — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 03:52:08 +0000

The key difference between film, particularly animation, and comics is that comics don't move. Rather, our eyes move over the panels in a way that is both linear and sequential and ex/implosive and radiating. A great irony of the superhero comic is that the substance of its plot is all action, hence the preponderance of "POW!s" and "BAM!s" and heroes frozen in poses of swinging, slugging, flying, and leaping. Furthermore, the superhero comic is predicated on the momentous event, the apocalyptic destruction of the world is perpetually on the horizon. It is not surprising then that comics that react against the superhero comic tend to downplay the notion of action, even to the point of nullifying it altogether. Yes, Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth includes events, but not particularly momentous ones, at least not in the contemporary part of the story. Jimmy's foot gets run over. His Dad's car gets stolen. "POW" is replaced by the "drip" of Jimmy's nose. Think of all those frames that are effectively "still life" or empty spaces. Jason Shiga's Empire State is another version of the "inaction comic." It's subtitle "A Love Story (Or Not)" gives on the one hand and takes away with parentheses on the other, freezing the story in indeterminacy. And there is something Corrigan-esque about this Jimmy; he can't make it with girls, and his mother is a pain in the neck. He's a tech geek (though perhaps not a particularly skilled one) who works at the library and fiddles with his website. Shiga draws Jimmy, and most of the rest of his characters, in a way that can only be described as "schlumpy." Their shoulders are round, and their heads big. They do not possess the "pecs and pipes" of the superhero. Rather they look like they have just emerged from a cocoon and have not quite straightened out yet. They look burdened and unassertive. When Jimmy's friend Sara says, "I prefer someone passive and weak-willed who I can push around," it barely registers as ironic. The arc of the story is that Sara, the love interest (or not), moves to New York. Lovelorn (or not), Jimmy decides to chase after her. He writes her a letter that declares he wants to meet her on the observation floor of the Empire State Building on Presidents' Day, (Valentine's Day has already passed), sort of like Sleepless in Seattle , a gesture that he calls "simultaneously unoriginal and psychotic." Jimmy's gambit doesn't work. Before bidding Jimmy goodbye at the airport, Sara give him a hug, "just to get you through the next year or two." The hug links Jimmy to one of Sara's dates from the past, whom she met through a dating service. He was 400 pounds and had to use ski polls to keep his knees from buckling. Sara made out with him because "I just didn't want to treat him the same way every other woman does." The failure of the journey to New York from Oakland undercuts the whole notion of heroic action and "epic" adventure. Not to mention any romantic comedy conventions that the allusion to Sleepless in Seattle gives rise to. The only "action" in Empire State is Jimmy hitting Sara in the eye with a slushball: "Splat!" As with Jimmy Corrigan, the chief existential problem in Empire State is the central character's inability to achieve adulthood in the modern world: "I'm an adult. I should have a newspaper subscription. I should be smoking a pipe and attending the opera regularly." Jimmy imagines that growing up should be like Luke Skywalker's character growth in the Star Wars movies: "Like, do you remember how in the first two 'Star Wars' movies Luke is this bratty little kid. But then you see him in 'Jedi' and he's a total badass." The analogy is probably not the best one for someone seeking maturity because it is so associated with the childhood imagination. But it is also an analogy based on confidence gained through heroic exploits. What makes Luke a "badass" is action. Furthermore, that action is based on zen-like self-surrender, a "force" that Jimmy can have no access to because he is so self-preoccupied. At times it seems as if graphic novels like Empire State and Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth are so intent on dismissing the possibility of super heroic transformation that they dismiss any possibility of transformation whatsoever: losers don't get bitten by spiders and become heroes; they just stay losers. When Grant Morrison was recently taken to task for criticizing Chris Ware for his negativity, I believe that this "inaction" is what he was getting at. So, we might say, welcome to the bi-polar world of comics: the mania of the superhero comic at one end and the melancholy of the inaction comic at the other. Neither pole has any greater claim to "realism" than the other. Total losers are just as unlikely as Superman. The inaction of Empire State made me appreciate the genius of Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim. Scott is a character not entirely unlike Jimmy in Empire State; he's a bass player for goodness' sake. But he does play in the band. And he fights evil ex-boyfriends in spectacular battles to win Ramona. O'Malley presents a deft version of the "have your cake and eat it too" version of the loser/hero dichotomy of the super hero comic. In doing so he re-iterates the existentialist ethic of the super-hero comic: everyone must choose and act as if the world depended on it. I loved Empire State. John Pham's colours are gorgeous when combined with Shiga's atmospheric images of Oakland and New York, and Shiga's arrangement of the panels on the page makes the reader appreciate the process of reading comics more than any text this side of Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp. But when I think about how critics tend to valorize inaction comics over action comics, I can't help but recall a comment that David Lee Roth once made, which goes something like this: "Most music critics prefer Elvis Costello to Van Halen because most music critics look like Elvis Costello."

#45 Scott Pilgrim Again: Masculinity and Fighting and Gayness and Such

admin — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 04:23:54 +0000

I'm almost done talking about Scott Pilgrim. For a while, anyway. I guess. But before I do, we have to talk dudeness in the series. Because it's complicated. Issues around homosexuality, masculinity, and violence abound in the narrative, and work together to create a complex picture of contemporary maleness. Let's start with Wallace Wells: Fabulous Gay Roommate. Wallace, however, is more than Scott's gay roommate -- Wallace pays all the bills, bankrolls much of Scott's social life, and acts as a protective, older brother figure to the terminally clueless Scott. Without Wallace, Scott would be homeless and penniless; Scott is, as Wallace points out, his "bitch forever." On a date with Ramona, Scott tells her he has borrowed Wallace's credit card. Deeply unimpressed with the "agreement" Scott professes to have, she accuses him of freeloading -- which is basically accurate. But Bryan Lee O'Malley isn't content to make Wallace a Gay Best Friend archetype à la Sassy Gay Friend or the Pet Homosexual. Instead, Wallace's sexuality is fully developed, he has relationships outside of the framework of his relationship with Scott, he has an identity and a set of life experiences of his own, and he doesn't simply act as a foil to or reflection of Scott's experience. Wallace Wells gets to be -- wait for it -- a whole person! Through Wallace, O'Malley is able to challenge notions of sexual identity and sexuality; as the breadwinner of the tiny "family" of himself and Scott, Wallace takes on a stereotypically masculine role, but subverts it by virtue of his homosexuality and his lack of sexual relationship to Scott. (When Wallace takes a sexual interest in Other Scott, however, this relationship becomes slightly more complicated.) Because of his unique living situation -- he literally shares a bed with his gay roommate -- Scott spends a lot of time (especially in volume 1) attempting to convince Ramona that he is not, in fact, gay; O'Malley manages to create a homonormative space wherein these two characters exist. For all his (significant and numerous) faults, Scott's comfort with Wallace and with his own identity are compelling aspects of his character. This homonormative apartment space is altogether interesting when considered against the larger frame of the series: remember, the central conceit here is a masculinized and largely heteronormative one. Scott must defeat Ramona's seven evil exes in order to win her hand; of course, this very framework is challenged in a few ways, namely (1) Ramona's disinterest in the process, and (2) the femaleness of one of the exes. But the framework is still one by which masculinity -- and the spoils of masculinity in the form of the desired woman -- are achieved through physical (albeit cartoony) violence. In volume three, the battle is Todd, a vegan with superpowers bestowed upon him at a Hogwarts-like school for vegan ninja fighters. Todd's self-righteous veganism ("The main thing to know is that I'm better than most people.") is what protects him, not his idealized masculine form or his superior physical strength. He's larger, stronger, better looking, and more gifted than Scott, but his power of veganism (which frees up the 90% of the brain the rest of us have weighted down by curds and whey) is what enables him to harm Scott. His power, then, is specifically not rooted in masculinity or maleness, but in... diet? Here's the thing about Scott Pilgrim. For a series all about fighting, there's remarkably little actual fighting. The Todd fight produces a perfect example: about to be defeated, Scott lampshades us: "I need some kind of, like, last minute, poorly-set-up, deus ex machina." Enter the vegan police to arrest Todd for "veganity violations" -- namely, consumption of gelato. The upshot is that the fight ends without Scott having to do very much of anything, though he claims the victory proudly. The fight isn't brawn versus brawn or even brain versus brawn. It's vegan versus deus ex machina. That's got to be a new trope. So while Scott Pilgrim is a series that appears on the surface to reify a heteronormative, fairy-tale-like worldview -- rescue the princess, defeat the monsters -- it is more complicated than that specifically because O'Malley seems committed to continually challenging that heteronormativity. How masculinity is defined is always sliding and shifting, whether through Wallace's subverted patriarchal role or Todd's vegan power. This is part of what makes the Scott Pilgrim series so much more complex and interesting than it first appears.

#46 Sites of Visual and Textual Innovation

admin — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 03:39:07 +0000

Our report from the First International Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels: Sites of Visual and Textual Innovation" at the Instituto Franklin in Alcala de Henares, Spain.

Day 1

Having missed the panels on the first day of the "Sites of Visual and Textual Innovation" conference at the Instituto Franklin in Alcala de Henares, Spain because of a late flight, today (Thursday November 10, 2011) was all action. One of the highlights of the day was Roger Sabin's keynote talk on Ally Sloper, the Victorian comic, and promotional culture in England. While Sabin estimated that only 1% of English people today know about Sloper, in his time, he was hugely popular with the working class. Sabin's emphasis was on the "paratext" in Ally Sloper, the advertisements, contests, and other materials that showed Ally Sloper spilling out of the comic and entering other cultural forms. The range of good papers included Ian Hague's "Comics as a Tactile Medium" on the "feel" of comics both paper and digital and how the haptic, tactile experience informs the way we perceive comics. He talked about how the shape and hardness of Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers related to enduring memories of 9/11 and various force feedback mechanisms (vibrations and such) in digital versions of Brian O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim. The conference represents the wide variety of research being done on comics today, from avant garde work to mass produced superhero comics. But more than criticism is on offer. Practitioners such as Joris Vermassen are also talking about their work. Vermassen showed his work on a new form of combining images (paintings and drawings) and 200 word stories. It involves 20 by 20 centimeter panels that can interact with each other in various ways. While Vermassen produces traditional comics, he is finding the new form a liberating one. I eagerly anticipate the results. Day 2

Day 3

From my perspective, the last day of the Instituto Franklin comics conference in Alcala was perhaps the best for me in terms of developing my own understanding of how comics work. The early morning "Theory" session featured Chris Kuipers, a fellow alumnus from the University of California, Irvine, arguing that the graphic novel as the latest "royal genre," following on from the novel and the epic in "Epic, Roman, Graphic Novel: Three Royal Genres". A "royal" genre governs the way literature is thought about in any particular era, embodying the technology of the period, which is partly responsible for its transformation and incorporation of previous genres. The comic's engagement with web technology is a component of its potential for dominance. Kuipers pointed out that "graphic novel" is a weak term for this kind of text; it is a term trying to gain credibility from a past genre, and does not adequately represent what long form comics are. Barbara Tversky, a cognitive psychologist from Stanford, presented a fascinating talk ("Aspects of Depictions in Graphic Narratives") about how comics are perceived in terms of action and complexity, dependent on culture. Her discussion started with visual (iconic?) instructions, such as a blow-up diagram and instructions on how to put together a bookshelf, and related how the mind processes them to the way it processes a comic. Nicolas Thiessen, in "You Don't Know How to Read a Comic" took issue with formalist approaches to reading comics, suggesting that the intuited pattern of moving from left to right and top to bottom was in no way a necessity. His argument hinged on the Heideggerian notion of equipment, which has no existence as equipment separate from its use. Likewise, form does not inhere in a comic, but rather is imposed on it through our reading of it. Perhaps my favorite presentation from a session on experimental narrative was Ian Horton on "Information Design, Experimental Comic Books, and Narrative Form." Again, Ikea and Habitat instructions played their role in getting at how comics work. He then moved on to Will Eisner's comics instructions for the US army to address issues of complexity and functionality in these instructions. Horton challenged the notion that representing instructions visually through comics does not necessarily simplify matters. H then discussed Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library #20, popularly known as Lint to show the elements of information design that Ware has incorporated into his overtly aestheticized work. The keynote, and closing, speech of the day was Charles Hatfield appraising the state of independent comics in 2011. Hatfield used four examples: Adrian Tomine's latest issue of Optic Nerve , the latest issue of the Hernandez brothers Love and Rockets, a licensed Simpsons property, Treehouse of Horror, and an experimental comics broadsheet,Pood. Hatfield discussed the impact of large publishing companies like Bertelsmann and MacMillan taking on Drawn and Quarterly and Fantagraphics titles, the diminishing power of the direct market comics shop model, and the way that "graphic novels" as long form "high end" texts have perhaps eclipsed the "floppy," as the slim, soft-covered, stapled comic is commonly known. As what was formerly been independent has been co-opted by the mainstream, Hatfield, sees mini comics and webcomics as the new inhabitants of the independent realm. In giving synopses of these talks, I am sure that I have distorted them. In order to correct that distortion, you should seek out the published versions of these papers which are sure to come out.

#47 Really Awesome Art and Not Thinking Like an English Person

admin — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 22:28:43 +0000

In the last six weeks or so I started a new blogging gig over at Book Riot, which is a new online book discussion community. I enjoy blogging for them, not least because sometimes people send me free books for review now. The lovely folks at House of Anansi Press sent me Robert Lepage, Marie Michaud, and Fred Jourdain's The Blue Dragon, which I reviewed for Book Riot last weekish. Since that review, though, I've been thinking a lot about The Blue Dragon and how it challenges my notions of how I engage with graphic narratives. Like the rest of the Graphixia team, I'm an English scholar by training. I know about words and word-like stuff. I love graphic narratives (obviously) and like to think I've become a good critical reader of visual texts (see post history for evidence for disagreement), but I realized while reading The Blue Dragon that I am still guilty of privileging the written narrative over the graphic; that is, I look first to the story, and then look to the ways the images augment or complicate or ironize the story. I'm still not, I think, reading as a cohesive whole. The Blue Dragon made this clear to me because the visual imagery is so central; page after page the dialogue is subsumed by the graphics, as you can see in these (admittedly terrible and from my cell phone, sorry) pictures. (The book is a gorgeous, huge 9x12 volume and hard to scan.) If I were to minimize the visual in this text I would miss the whole point; its sweeping, epic power emerges from these magnificent painterly images. They are ignored at my own peril. I don't think this is strictly, for me, a matter of lacking critical tools -- I've read all the old standbys like Understanding Comics. I think it comes down to the fact that I have been trained and wired to consume texts in a particular way, so if I'm not consciously foregrounding the visual, my default position is to privilege the story. Part of the resolution, I think, is for me to read more of these sorts of graphic narratives where the visual imagery refuses to be seen as merely a servant to the more traditional narrative. In effect, I need to retrain myself to focus on the visual. My taste normally runs to sparse imagery (like Tangles: A Memoir of Alzheimer's, My Mother, and Meor Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography, both of which I've discussed before on Graphixia); in such comics, I am often rewarded for primarily seeing the visual images as complimentary or complicating factors rather than the main event. I'm working on stepping out of that comfort zone and focusing more on texts where the driving force is the visually imagery. The Blue Dragon is a good first step in this direction. The imagery is theatrical, grand, and fantastic in its depth -- Jourdain's painting-like illustrations evoke both the central motif of the commodification of art and the larger emotional canvas of the narrative. I can't default to the written narrative here because so much is primarily in the images. So here I start rethinking the privilege of prose and elevating the image in my conception of comics. Say that three times fast.

#48 "The New 52": DC's Reboot and Comics as Commodities

admin — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:21:01 +0000

Given that I’m a heavily invested comic book collector who purchases (and reads) nearly a hundred titles a month, many other collectors and casual readers have been asking for my take on the recent DC reboot of its entire superhero comics’ franchise. This reboot, which DC dubbed “The New 52,” signals a sea change in the publishing magnate’s history – for the first time, DC restarted the longest running of its titles, Action and Detective comics, along with every other title in its superhero canon, resetting all 52 titles of the DC Universe all to issue #1. The only titles left unscathed were those from its Vertigo imprint, with Hellblazer now being DC’s longest running, continuous monthly ongoing series. The reboot is, however, not just a simple renumbering of DC’s titles (they had tried that previously with several other series in the mid 1980s after “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” though not with its longer running titles that had been established in the Golden Age), but a complete overhaul of the line, with all continuity rules revoked and all characters’ histories, costumes and environments rendered mutable for a new generation of authors and readers. In this universe, Superman has never met Batman and he is new to the public eye (no underwear on the outside of their costumes either now), the Justice League is a new invention, and Dick Grayson has apparently never been Batman – none of the nuances, and often even the broad strokes, of the stories of the last seventy-plus years are meant to carry any weight regarding character development. This was a significant gamble on the part of DC’s creative team of Dan DiDio, Jim Lee and Geoff Johns, and while the general mainstream media thought that the move was compelling, the message boards on DC’s website showed significant skepticism and, at times, outright hostility; why were these characters, with whom readers had identified and grown up with, being completely revamped? Moreover, does “The New 52” actually meet these expectations? Despite the general protests to the contrary. These answers lie not in the creative, cerebral process of writing, but in the nuts and bolts of the publishing industry itself. First, however, a little recent history for those who are unfamiliar with the lead-up to “The New 52” and how it came about in the DC Universe. DC’s Chief Creative Officer, Geoff Johns, began the reboot with his summer event Flashpoint, a miniseries that spanned thirteen separate three-issue arcs plus several one shots (the total issue count for the story rounding out at a planned 52). The plotline centres on the Flash, Johns’ staple character who he’d written for years previously. Barry Allen, the recently resuscitated Silver Age Flash, is thrown into a universe rife with discontinuities such as Batman’s secret identity being Thomas Wayne (Bruce having been shot instead of his parents), half of Europe having been sunk in a war between Atlantis and the Amazons, and Superman having been found by the military instead of by the Kents, locked up as a secret weapon for the US government. The stories see some very talented writers being given free rein to upset character conventions and essentially trace out a “What If?” of the DCU in a fashion similar to what Marvel had accomplished (with great success) a few years prior with its summer event “House of M.” The cause of the skewing of continuity (spoiler alert), is Professor Zoom’s time traveling murder of Barry Allen’s mother, a problem that gets remedied (through means too complex to discuss here) by the end of Flashpoint. The final pages of the last issue of the miniseries show readers that there is indeed a logic to the then-upcoming reboot: All of the continuities, past and present, merge into one due to Barry Allen’s tinkering with the timestream, resetting the DC Universe into a single whole, a fresh starting point that bears some similarities with past stories, but also one that contains many differences. What results is the aforementioned “New 52,” a supposed renewal and revitalization of the DCU that is, because of Flashpoint, also speciously (almost paradoxically) aligned with current continuity. Because comics are marketed to their readers three months in advance of their publication date, comic fandom caught wind of the upset early on, seeing that their next months’ purchase would not be Action Comics #905 but Action Comics #1, and that this Superman would be dramatically different from the character they had previously known. Responding to the often vitriolic comments from fans on the message boards, DiDio published, at the back of every DC comic book two months prior to “The New 52,” the logic and motivation behind the change, followed by an impassioned request to keep readers reading, regardless of the fact that the current stories would be written out of continuity only a couple months in the future. As DiDio himself put it, “Why buy DC comics in August? After all, if everything is starting over in September, why not just wait to start reading books again?” DiDio, at the close of his response, provides the answer that one should remain a DC reader “because you love comics, and we make some of the best ones out there.” The request itself is interesting in that it addresses the concerns that readers had regarding the reboot at all – if they were significant enough to merit a full-page addressing in every issue of the DCU, then one wonders why the company would have opted for the change in the first place. The company line itself seems torn as well in both denying the import of continuity in superhero comics while reaffirming it at the same time; DC’s Executive Editor writes of Flashpoint that “[what’s] appearing here pretty much sets you up for DC – The New 52. You can’t let Flashpoint go as something that does not count. It’s the gateway into what’s coming in September.” The paradox was something of a problem for readers, who were being told to ignore continuity while at the same time being told to purchase DC strictly because of it. The answer lies in something that we have discussed very little in Graphixia, being the fact that comics, beyond their content, are marketable goods. The costs of their publication are increasing, from paper to ink to artists’ wages, and DC plays (or played) second string to Marvel’s market dominance for some time now. Coupled with this, print media in general is in a steady decline. The print runs of even DC’s most successful titles (in Justice League and Green Lantern) were dropping significantly, and the company was struggling to maintain relevance. DiDio called, in a letters page similar to the one discussed above, for a throwback to the popularity of comics in the 1990s (which, admittedly, killed the market due to overpublication) with the return of variant covers, polybagged issues and marketing techniques that would allow the company to thrive in this changing environment – ironically, what was needed was a return to past efforts. The new 52 #1 issues then were then accompanied by a host of variant covers as well as a polybagged Justice League #1 which included a code to access the comic online, viewable on the iPad or a similar eReader, along with DC’s promise that all new publications would be available for purchase on the DC website the same day that they hit comic shop shelves. Beyond this, DiDio claimed that the new #1s would draw in new readers who had been, to this point, put off by the long-running histories that were potentially ostracizing to a readership unfamiliar with them or unwilling to do the required, often grueling research to get caught up with current continuity. Everyone, DiDio exclaimed, can now own their own copy of Action Comics #1 (albeit a problematic claim, given that the company was attempting to divorce its own history while relying on the historical popularity of both its titles and characters). The plan was, in short, incredibly effective. The marketing campaign, which was as far reaching as traditional newspapers and television, resulted in DC’s selling out of every title, with multiple prints having to be offered for the more popular titles – Justice League #1 is currently on its fourth printing, and several other titles have reached their third. Needless to say, for the last few months Marvel has been soundly trounced (despite an effort to copy DC’s newfound popularity by resetting its own long-running title Uncanny X-Men to issue #1 this month). DC has indeed returned to the sales figures of the past, at least for the time being, though the effectiveness of the long-term applications of the reboot remains in question. The problem lies in the fact that DC did not live up to its intended concept regarding the writing of its titles – it has marketed incredibly well, but the problems with content limiting the readership, a point that has been previously noted both in Graphixia’s podcasts and posts, remain. DC may have sold thousands more copies than anticipated of its #1s, though it did not sell the stories that it promised its readers. “The New 52” is a melee of authors experimenting with the titles they have written for for, in many cases, several years. Understandably, however, there appears to have been some significant resistance to the reboot on the part of some of the authors, especially as regards the Green Lantern host of titles – the authors here, Peter Tomasi, Tony Bedard, Peter Milligan and Johns himself, haven’t missed a beat and are writing, despite the #1 on the cover of their books, as nuanced and detailed stories that are directly reliant on the previous story arcs as if nothing had happened in the franchise. Flashpoint is not referred to, nor are there any noticeable alterations of continuity at all in the Green Lantern universe - in fact, in the aftermath of the recent "War of the Green Lanterns" arc that spanned three titles and a separate miniseries, it is more important than ever to do back reading to make sense of the current "entrypoint" that DC has established with the new #1 Green Lantern titles. Action Comics and Superman, however, are at odds even with each other, with Grant Morrison on the former title apparently being given carte blanche to write Superman as he sees fit without acknowledging even the continuity that is being newly established (as he did with his much lauded “All-Star Superman”) in the other Superman related series. Other titles have arisen seemingly to fill the number count of 52, with little in the way of content or storytelling – these are, most notably, Liefeld’s “Hawk and Dove” and J T Krul’s tepid take on “Green Arrow,” though there are several others that fall into this category. One is left wondering how long the 52 titles can last without a cancellation in their midst, though it’s too early to speculate at this point. That said, some of the titles have shown some promise, including Tony Daniels’ “Detective Comics” and, most especially, newcomers like Jeff Lemire’s “Animal Man,” though these were arguably strong and innovative titles prior to the relaunch as well, and little has changed in their telling. How then, do I respond, when people ask me about what I think about “The New 52”? My answer is typically “not much.” The stories that were strong prior to the reboot remain strong, largely because their authors have ignored the mandate of their publishing company; the weaker stories and characters remain weak, despite the presence of popular and up-and-coming authors; the new stories could have been told without the fanfare of the reboot at all. What I have to acknowledge however, especially given my print culture background, is that the reboot was necessary – without it, the company would likely have failed within a few years, with its characters being sold to other houses or being lost forever, much as what happened with Archie’s now defunct superhero line of comics or the critically acclaimed Miracleman by Alan Moore, which is currently held up in copyright limbo. In a sort of metacommentary on DC’s situation, Lois Lane identifies the problem herself in the new Superman #1. Referencing the destruction of the Daily Planet to make way for a new Planet owned and operated by the larger Galaxy Media, a self-professed “multimedia news super station,” she attests to a troubled Clark Kent that “You’ve seen the reports! You’ve seen the figures! Print is dying! We need this to survive!” It appears that if “The New 52” has been effective at anything, it is in the success of market dominance, if not a return to successful storytelling. This is likely why the creative team has been so problematic, as previously mentioned, in writing about the changes to the DCU themselves; there is a hint of Janus about the turn, in the attempt to draw in new readers with the promise of new continuities while quietly ensuring that the old readers are not left behind, even if they are telling us to expect a complete overhaul. What remains is a cunning revival of the comic as a product, a highlighting of the import of the commoditization of the story and the need to ensure the vitality of the market through whatever means necessary, regardless of how extreme they may at first appear. More uplifting, however, is a similar note from aforementioned Superman #1 that is a little more optimistic: the new owner of the Daily Planet (read DC), Morgan Edge, states to a press conference, “I know that many of you are greeting this day with mixed emotions and perhaps even some trepidation. After all, change is seldom easy. In fact, it can be downright painful. But, to paraphrase and mutilate the words of William Shakespeare: I’ve come not to bury the Planet, but to raise it.” Despite the dramatic overtones of the supposed “change,” this reader, at least, is glad of gimmicky nature of “The New 52,” if only because it means the continuation of the superhero comics’ industry and DC’s relevance in the world of print publication.

#49 Krazy Kat, E. E. Cummings, and the Burlesque of Comics

admin — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:36:57 +0000

In 1922, Gilbert Seldes proclaimed Krazy Kat “the most amusing and fantastic and satisfactory work of art produced in America today” (The Seven Lively Arts 22). Herriman’s Krazy Kat, a comic strip that ran from 1913 to 1944, took its aesthetic cues from Surrealism, Cubism, and Dadaism, and is distinctive for distorted and shifting landscapes that plunge in and out of the strip’s panels all the while presenting the recurring adventures of Ignatz the mouse and his attempt to “krease the Kat’s bean with a brick.” Made into an animated cartoon, a popular song, a post-modern novel and even a ballet, Krazy Kat has had its share of admirers, among them poet and artist E. E. Cummings. An avid collector of Krazy Kat comic strips, Cummings was always on the look-out for what he once called the “Kat of indescribably beauty” (30). Describing himself as “An author of pictures, a draughtsman of words,” Cummings occupies a unique position as both painter and poet. Cummings works both sides of the representational fence conscientiously accounting for visual and auditory signals of language. Like Herriman, Cummings was playful with the genre, breaking conventions and confounding expectations--well, except for the brick to the head thing. Like the illustrator and writer of a comic strip, Cummings is very conscious of the formal arrangement of the page as it signals audible remarks, image forms, and narrative logic. Cummings devoured Krazy Kat comics sent to him by friends in America while he was living in the Paris milieu of the 1920s and all its converging artistic movements. During this time, he also adopted the strip’s alliterative “K” in his letters and was beginning in earnest to explore the stylistic techniques that would come to identify his poetry so forcefully. Cummings’ move to break the poetic line, place an emphasis on vernacular language, and a highly visual formulation of the page-space, all find their counterparts in the daily Krazy Kat strips. Herriman’s playful use of the vernacular, his “strictly irrational landscape in perpetual metamorphosis”—as Cummings called it—and his presentation of the ordinary within the philosophical discourses of self-discovery, appeal to Cummings’ own sense of poetic expression. Moreover, both artists engage in sustained attempts to expand and explode the grammar of their media. By pushing traditional modes of expression in areas such as the line, space, syntax, alliteration, and logic, Herriman and Cummings operate through a creative paradigm that is highly intellectual and incorporates humour, pictorial representation and linguistic play. In an essay about Krazy Kat, published in the 1946 Sewanee Review and included in a later Collection of Herriman's Krazy Kat strips, Cummings calls the strip “a meteoric burlesk melodrama” (30). The characterization is interesting when taken in concert with Cummings' "technical" explanation for his poetry in 1926’s is 5: “I can express it in fifteen words, by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesque: “Would you hit a woman with a child?—No, I’d hit her with a brick” (180). In qualifications about the nature of art and aesthetics, Cummings frequently refers to elements of the burlesque as they appear in Krazy Kat, highlighting its emphasis on play, humour, and its ability to push the boundaries of what constitutes acceptable representation. In Cummings' letters, he refers to the “the irrefutable down-to-earth authenticity of burlesk” with “its gift of fearlessness, its devastating habit of suddenly debunking the most sacred pomposities. It can be seen miraculously coupled with an infallible pity which is the prerogative of genius." These same qualities are apparent in Herriman's comic strip. Taking the unity between Cummings’ stern support of individuality in art and life as a cue, there are clearly lines of force between popular culture, the burlesque, Krazy Kat, and Cummings’ formal aesthetics in poetry. The question is, do these supposed similarities between the construction of modernist popular art—burlesque, comic strips—give us access to a new set of definitional criteria through which to understand and define modernist artistic practice more generally, and in those genres we deem "intellectual" or "traditional" or Artistic? There's a ton of commentary on Krazy Kat and Herriman on the internets. Do yourself a favour and check into the dialogue. Herriman's strip is one of the most critically interrogated and intellectually lauded of all time. Sometimes, I must admit, I'm not quite sure why; what with the brick to the head thing over and over and over.

#50 Manifesto

admin — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 05:37:27 +0000

Peter Wilkins and David N. Wright started the Graphixia blog over a year ago. It began as a writing project on Google Documents in which Peter and Dave traded paragraphs on comics in a quasi-critical dialogue, trying to figure out if they had anything notable to say about comics. After one false start, Peter and Dave set up Graphixia as a weekly writing project to replace the now flagging Google Documents exchange. The idea was to produce 500 words per post on whatever struck their interest about comics. Things really took off when Brenna Clarke Gray and Scott Marsden joined the conversation, diversifying the blog’s content and broadening its critical horizons. In order to maintain momentum and improve content, Graphixia presents this 50th post setting the following goals for the coming year:

improve the quality of content making it more akin to that found in an academic journal
produce a style sheet and ensure that posts are properly documented
establish a backlog of posts in order to ensure regular publication every Tuesday at 6:00 AM
produce at least 4 podcasts per year at scheduled intervals during the seasonal solstice
invite and peer-review submissions
network with other, like-minded blogs and comics researchers to raise the profile of comics scholarship
explore different ways to use web resources and computer technology to enhance the discussion of comics and to link that discussion with the broader endeavours of the Digital Humanities
produce an “Annual” that publishes its yearly work in either e-book or print form
submit papers to comics conferences and journals to enhance our reputation as a hub of comics scholarship and investigate institutional affiliations
host an academic conference of 3-5 days in the summer of 2013.

Thanks to everyone for continuing to read and support Graphixia this year. We look forward to providing more insightful and enthusiastic commentary on comics. If you are a comics scholar, practitioner, or fan, consider submitting a post idea to Graphixia. For those of you new to the blog, here are links to our top eleven most read posts from 2011:

#51 "Are the Japanese Good Chaps, Tintin?": The Blue Lotus and Race

admin — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:00:36 +0000

When I read Tintin books as a child, their politics were never an issue. I only concerned myself with adventure and the delightful drawings and colours. Hergé’s earliest efforts, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in the Congo--crude, unresearched endeavors--were not available. Tintin in America with its “red” Indians and Al Capone seemed innocent enough in the 1970s, particularly from a Canadian perspective; we held all the stereotypes about the United States that the book did. So it has been a surprise to return to the early Tintin and find politics all over the place. These politics were complicated by editorial requirements. Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in the Congo were commissioned by Abbé Norbert Wallez, Hergé’s editor at Le Petit Vingtième, as anti-Soviet propaganda and an endorsement of Belgian rule respectively (The Adventures of Tintin). So it is as difficult to grasp Hergé’s actual politics from them as it is to glean anything about the inner psyche of his hero. Except to say that Hergé was perfectly willing to write such texts for his conservative Roman Catholic newspaper, just as he was willing to put Tintin in Le Soir, the same French language, pro-occupation paper that Paul de Man wrote for during World War II (CBC Books). By all accounts, though, The Blue Lotus marks a turn for Hergé. In this book, he shifts from stereotype and fantasy to research and detail (The Blue Lotus). Instead of making unreflective, stereotypical representations of nations as he does with The Soviet Union, The Congo, and The United States, Hergé tries to represent China of the 1930s with accuracy and sympathy. By doing so, he disparages European colonial powers, but more importantly, Japan. Page 6 of The Blue Lotus, with its striking page layout, is the crucial one for establishing Hergé’s cultural negotiatons. A typical Tintin page consists of four rows of panels of uniform height and variable width. Each row generally contains three to four panels. This page, however, consists of typical top and bottom rows with a large streetscape panel occupying the space usually taken by the middle two rows. The way this middle panel anchors and controls the way we read the top row of panels, which refers to the Japanese arch-villain Mr Mitsuhirato, and the bottom row of panels, which depicts the crude racism of the European Gibbons, establishes the political hegemony of Tintin over China, that is, the hegemony of the “true” European as opposed to the perverse and arrogant European represented by Gibbons and the slick, deceptive Japanese Mr Mitsuhirato. The top three panels across the top show Tintin responding to a letter from Mr. Mitsuhirato and preparing to call upon him.

We will later learn that Mitsuhirato, drawn with a pig-nosed face, orchestrates the sabotage of the South Manchurian railway line as a means for Japan to make further incursions into China. For now, though, Tintin is impressed: “he’s certainly a man with impeccable manners....” Snowy asks, “Are Japanese good chaps, Tintin?” If our ears are attuned to irony, we will know that we are being set up here. Tintin is too impressed, and Snowy’s comment raises doubts, questioning rather than affirming Tintin’s opinion of Mitsuhirato. Everything in these panels is based on the letter that Mitsuhirato has sent, not on Tintin’s first hand experience; all his interpretations are speculative: “I wonder how Mr Mitsuhirato knew I was here.” In the bottom three panels, however, Tintin literally collides with European arrogance: A man in European dress, whom we later learn is named Gibbons, walks into the street without looking. He is reading his newspaper as he walks, apparently expecting all traffic to come to a halt for him. He doesn’t need to look; the natives must look out for him. Tintin’s rickshaw driver is unable to stop and crashes into Gibbons, who responds vehemently, holding his cane above his head as if to strike: “Dirty little China-man!...To barge into a white man!” So a page that begins with a reflection on the “impeccable manners” displayed in Mitsuhirato’s letter ends with an exhibition of utmost rudeness from Gibbons. The large middle frame turns the page into a dialectic with Tintin being the term that mediates and supersedes Mitsuhirato and Gibbons. The wide angle streetscape offers a comprehensive picture of harmony, anchored by Tintin and Snowy in the back of the rickshaw. Tintin looks resplendent, even princely, in this panel. Both he and Snowy sit politely, almost primly. While the Rickshaw driver’s ribs are showing and his mouth is open to get as much air in him as possible, the other faces in the panel are smiling. A close look at the panel reveals boxes, pails, buckets and baskets as most people are carrying something, suggesting industry. Banners cross the street horizontally and signs hang down vertically, creating the image of a vibrant street: busy but orderly. Gibbons upsets that order, as we can see from Tintin’s disordered tie, the droplets shooting from his head, and Snowy’s raised eyebrows. We see a distinct contrast here between correct and incorrect European behaviour, with Gibbons as the corrupt exponent of colonial power, and “our superb western civilisation” (7) and Tintin as the ideal version: dominant but quiet and polite. The good European fits into the picture; he doesn’t disrupt it. Later in the book, Tintin saves Chang Chong-chen from the river. Chang is surprised that Tintin has saved him, given Chang’s presumptions about westerners: “I thought all white devils were wicked, like those who killed my grandfather and grandmother long ago,” referring to the Boxer Rebellion. Tintin responds with mid 1930s multiculturalism: “You see, different peoples don’t know enough about each other” (43). He then goes through a list of European misconceptions about the Chinese: “all Chinese are cunning and cruel and wear pigtails, are always inventing tortures, and eating rotten eggs and swallows’ nests...” (43). Right after Tintin runs through this list, Hergé cuts to a panel with Mitsuhirato and his pig nose. The juxtaposition is incredible, as though Hergé is blind to the import of his own character’s words. Different peoples don’t know enough about each other; they have preconceptions and prejudices that we must see through...and by the way, here’s an image of a Japanese man with a pig face. The sociable understanding that Tintin and Chang come to about their people’s prejudices towards each other clearly does not extend to the Japanese. We can erase notions of Chinese foot-binding and infanticide and Western devils from our heads, but not the piggish qualities of the Japanese. Whatever The Blue Lotus says about European arrogance, racism, and entitlement is redeemed by the doubling of Tintin and Chang: two boys who overcome their differences and work together: “What a good friend you are, Chang!” (47). But Mitsuhirato has no redemptive qualities and no explanation that his evil is particular and individual rather than representative of a whole people. Gibbons’ brutality on page 6 is offset by Tintin’s politeness and western apologism. Mitsuhirato’s “impeccable manners” in his letter to Tintin are simply and thoroughly undercut. At the end of the day, The Blue Lotus is just as ideological and stereotypical as Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in the Congo. Hergé critiques Europeans, but only the bad ones. He celebrates the Chinese. But he excoriates the Japanese and does so through animalistic caricature, foreshadowing the representation of the Japanese during World War II when the Allies paid special attention to the “racial differences” between the Japanese and the Chinese. While Hergé ostensibly supports the notion that different cultures have to make more effort to understand each other, his support extends only to friendly nations and peoples. It is still legitimate to portray people and cultures you don’t like as animals. This portrayal is doubly significant for the medium of comics which depends so much on caricature, raising questions about the image of the “enemy” in comics and its relation to the the racial other.

Works Cited

Hergé. The Adventures of Tintin: The Blue Lotus. Trans: Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner. London: Mammoth, 1990. Print

#33 Medium, Genre, and the Visible World in Yoshihiro Tatsumi's A Drifting Life

admin — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 18:03:14 +0000

I don't know much about manga, Japanese comics, but I know a lot more now that I have read Yoshihiro Tatsumi's A Drifting Life, a "memoir" of one of the most well-known manga creators. Tatsumi was responsible for creating "gekiga," a genre of manga that sought to differentiate itself from manga for kids, which, as typical for comics everywhere it seems, was seen as a corrupting influence. I put memoir in quotation marks above because Tatsumi renames himself Hiroshi Katsumi in the book, suggesting a distance or even displacement between historical reality and what the book represents. However, I have seen no reviewer call the book fiction rather than memoir. And the book has little in it to suggest that it might be anything different than Tatsumi's own memories of his own experience. Still, the renaming is curious, as if Tatsumi is objectifying himself, looking at himself as if he were someone else. The memoir covers 15 years, from the end of World War II in 1945 to 1960, the year of the Security Treaty between Japan and the US. The state of Japan and its national psychology after the war are always in the background, as Tatsumi includes several key historical points, such as General MacArthur's being removed from command in Japan in 1951. These pieces of history tend to be drawn differently than the clear lines of the main story, with more shading and cross hatching. The same is true of the many films (Japanese, American, European) that Tatsumi refers to. Clearly, political history and film are the key extrinsic influences on "Katsumi's" artistic development. Indeed, the book concludes with Katsumi drawn into a massive protest over the Security Treaty. The protest somehow inspires him to persist in the gekiga genre. When he notices that "Japan, too, is adrift" (825), it makes Katsumi somehow iconic of Japan's postwar situation, and suggests a new socio-political bent to his work. Such work does not appear in this volume, and readers more familiar with Tatsumi's post-1960 output will have to vouch for, or dismiss, this suggestion. The historical elements have more to do with manga's place in post-war Japanese culture than with the manga represented in this book. Film, however, is much more prominent in Katsumi's artistic development. When he can't work, Katsumi goes to the movies and incorporates filmic concepts into his work. Anyone studying the relationship between film and comics would do well to read this book. Gekiga is an attempt to bring a more cinematic scope to manga. Katsumi wants to slow stories down and develop them over greater space than the short stories that publishers want allow. A Drifting Life shows the development of a medium and the difficulties in establishing a new genre within that medium more than the personal development of its creator. Katsumi's father is something of a ne'erdowell and, while his parents share the same roof, they are to all intents and purposes separated. His brother Okimasa has pleurisy. One of his sister's friends develops a crush on him. The few sexual or romantic relationships (a brief dalliance with a restaurant "madam" and an episode in which Katsumi is pursued by a forward high school girl) are presented so as to show how inconsequential they are. These details of a life are just that. The real story is of the manga. And it is amazing how engrossing 840 pages of meta-manga can be: the conditions of its production, the vagaries and vicissitudes of the publishing industry and the rental manga business. And, apropos of last week's post, manga production is a boys' world in Japan during the period represented in the book. There are no female artists, just a series of rising male stars who compete with each other in a homosocial world. A sequence in which the manga boys do life drawing with a nude female model who falls asleep and exposes herself in the process, shows just how isolated they are from women. The tension in the memoir is between the demands of convention, even though those demands are recent in themselves, and the desire to invent a new mode of art. Katsumi's brother, Okimasa, another manga artist, is the voice of conservatism and tradition. When Katsumi shows him a version of his "manga that is not manga" he says, "Frankly, I don't know if this kind of expression is a new technique or a waste of paper"(548). Although he is ultimately supportive, Okimasa shows how Katsumi is trying to break new ground. Meanwhile he competes with another manga artist, Matsumoto, who invents his own genre, "Komaga." The curious thing about reading this book without having seen the work that it refers to is how evocative it is of that work. When Tatsumi draws manga within the text, it is usually difficult to see with any clarity, tiny squiggles and little drawings or dark, photograph-like images. To see what Tatsumi is writing and drawing is to imagine it from the theoretical conversations Katsumi has with his brother or Katsumi's own reflections. Performing that act of imagination engages the relationship between the bodily eye and the mind's eye that makes comics so intellectually interesting. With its depictions of historical moments, movie images, undecipherable manga images, and beautiful location drawings, A Drifting Life poses the great questions of comic book art: What are you looking at? What do you see? I have no doubt that I will return to A Drifting Life or that I will seek out more of Tatsumi's work. In the mean time, I am devouring Mitsuru Adachi's Cross Game, getting into the manga groove.

Works Cited

Tatsumi, Yoshihiro. A Drifting Life. Ed. Adrian Tomine. Trans. Taro Nettleton. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2009.

#39 Worst Losers, Ever

admin — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 19:19:27 +0000

The protagonists in comicbooks, be they extra-terrestrial or earthly, are losers. They’re losers in the social sense (social, sexual, scientific misfits who wear the wrong things and look awkward in every social situation one could imagine), in the literal sense (they “lose” things like parents, friends, lovers), and in the figurative sense (nearly every comicbook plotline revolves around the recovery, however futile, of whatever has been lost). It’s as if the emphasis on a protagonist’s “loserness”—emotionally, figuratively, literally—is a necessity. One way to confront the comicbook’s “loser mode” is to look at how comics are understood in a broader cultural context. For instance, most of us learn to read by looking at picture books, which usually borrow (or did they invent?) the narrative structure that juxtaposes words and images to create movement across the page common to comics. From the initial contact with words onwards, we’re always looking for pictures that illustrate the text. There’s no great interest in the idea that we confront the written word with graphics from the beginning (if you are interested, check out Derrida), or that we conjure images in our minds when we read. What’s interesting is how those representations—the images that go with the words—are often of losers, right from the beginning. Some of you might have read something by these two: Without doubt the most roundly mocked couple in the history of reading. They’re losers in the strictest and cruelest sense. There’s nothing exciting about Dick and Jane, unless you want to let your interpretation make it interesting. Take the beloved Dr. Zuess as another example: Sally and “Me” are incapable of making fun for themselves: losers. They’re left alone in the house all day with a fish to look after them and they cannot think of anything to do. Really? If Sally has enough panache to request or tie that red bow in her hair, surely she could produce the illicit machinations common to children left alone in the house. And, how maniacally needy is that cat in the hat? He’s the loser in the class who keeps raising his hand shouting, “look at me, look at me now, look what I can do!” To some degree, all our early confrontations with image and text are through representations of losers; and it only gets worse. Soon, we’re hit with Superman, Batman, and Spider-man; all social misfits, perennial losers who happen to have a super power, which, in the irony of ironies, they cannot disclose to anyone and thus lose a good many things. Then come the more “realistic” comicbooks: the Jimmy Corrigan, Bruce Bechdel, Art Spiegelman in Maus, Seth in It’s a Good Life if You Don’t Weaken, Chester Brown in Paying for It. All losers in the multifarious definition noted above. Along with the reading of the comics are the individuals we must purchase them from. There is no flattering representation of comicbook store owners in popular culture. Indeed, the most famous of all is frequently imitated by those wishing to convey someone else’s idiocy or “loserdom”: Wade “Superboy” Adams in Season 3 of Sex and the City is another classic representation of the comicbook store owner. The title, “Hot Child in the City,” is a clue we don’t even need as we watch this man-child woo Carrie to his parent’s home wherein he still maintains a bedroom and dime-bag. Again and again, comics and their consumption is associated with losers.

But all is not lost, we’re just in a rut (coincidentally, the narrative continuity of comics, endlessly replaying the same plotline means that losers are always in a rut, always losers; they don’t even get to grow). When we look at how comics are positioned in popular culture, we see that they exude a calming effect. They almost manage the potential risk of figures who read them, like when Elvis Presley reads a comic book: At first glance, Presely’s preoccupation with the comic book reinforces his boyish innocence (one is reminded of Presley referring to everyone politely as “ma’am” or “sir”) and takes away from the sexual anxieties he aroused. The comic seems to present Presley as less threatening, naive, and to some extent unaware of his sexual prowess. That said, his reading of the comic book also connects him to a more illicit cultural production, one not bound by “literary” expectations or canonical learning—popular culture will do just fine for The King. Presely’s relaxed demeanour, and low tastes in reading material, work to reinforce anxieties about his corrupt, wiggling, gyrations, and what they do to all his female fans. The association of comics with illicit behaviour or taboo-breaking has a long history. Eric Clapton, whose string bending, distorted, impassioned guitar playing was the genesis for a slew of “guitar gods,” holds a Beano comic book in the iconic Bluesbreakers album cover often referred to as “The Beano Album.” The Beano was a serial anthology in the UK that featured mischief-makers such as Dennis the Menace (the crueller British version) and Minnie the Minx (who was “wild as wild can be”). Robert Crumb’s first taste of popular acclaim arguably arrived with his album-cover work on Cheap Thrills, the Big Brother and the Holding Company album that introduced Janis Joplin to the world. Just as Eric Clapton reading a Beano comic signals his own string bending feedback roar against the placid guitar playing of the era, Crumb's album cover signaled the arrival of Joplin's unique vocal growl and unconventional rockstar femininity. And so it goes, both losers and innovators. What comics show us is that the disenfranchised, the losers of the world, are the ones who tend to innovative and bring about change, the ones who possess that latent super power that will flourish. That's a powerful lesson; one that makes up for all the crappy representations of people associated with comicbooks in popular culture. That said, maybe we like rooting for losers because it's how we first confront the word. And, given that we first confront the word through the interplay of text and image, the association of the comicbook with the loser is simply inked into the guttered page; not something unique to the subject matter and protagonists common to comics and image/text representations, but to the very act(ion) of reading them. Finally, a bankshot: it’s no accident that all the calming of illicitness—or incitement of it—comes when a man reads—or sells—a comicbook. For women, the comicbook is something forbidden; it’s where boys go, and girls should proceed with the utmost of caution (note Carrie's clueless assumptions about comicbooks in the above Sex and The City video: "aren't comics a boy thing?"). Thankfully, many women do proceed without caution and thrive, bringing much needed perspective to the genre. However, that Marylin Monroe is pictured below reading James Joyce’s Ulysses tells us something about the representation of "literariness" works in popular culture, and how it can be subverted the same way comicbooks and the associations they conjure represent the act of reading and the expectations that go with that act. The picture above, we can only assume, is supposed to make Monroe look smart. I.e.: she’s not just a dumb blonde; she’s got academic literary chops and she's "high-minded" and "well read"; the perfect attractive, but socially safe, wife. And for some, the photo might temper Monroe’s sexuality and make her seem more intelligent than she comes off singing "Happy Birthday" to President Kennedy. But then, there’s this perspective, and all is lost: What’s really interesting about both these pictures is left to the losers of the world who have actually read Ulysses—itself a book full of losers. The careful observer will note that Monroe illicitly confirms her carnal potential by opening the book to its back pages and Molly Bloom’s protracted and empowering dialogue: “then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes” (Joyce 1). So, perhaps, women reading literature is as subversive, potentially innovative and carnival as men reading comicbooks.

#53 Where are the damned tights, Herge?: On Realizing Tintin Is a Superhero

admin — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:00:39 +0000

A conversation between me and fellow Graphixia writer @wilkinspeter: So I started off my Adventures with Tintin (see what I did there?) feeling very very very confused and largely irritable. This wasn't my first foray into Tintin; I read through them all when I was a kid because our public library had the whole set and because he seemed pretty neat. But when you're 10, your suspension of disbelief is not only willing, but joyful. You don't need a lot of back story to be satisfied with the plot as it unfolds. Because Tintin doesn't offer a lot of backstory. People are chasing him... because they are. He's a journalist... who never puts pen to paper. He seems to be in constant peril and yet never comes to harm. But why? I kept asking myself as I moved through title after title: what is going on, and why is it happening? Then I came to a startling realization that I was a victim of my own expectations of genre. Because of the way the books look, the set up of Tintin as an ordinary, unassuming reporter, the adventure narratives and the real life (if filtered) scenarios, I was expecting if not a slice-of-life comic, then something of a straightforward realist narrative. Such stories usually offer rich backstory and straightforward cause and effect. (Except when they don't.) But that's not what Tintin is. Tintin is a superhero, and these books are superhero comics. Slide into some tights and I'll explain. You know what you never really expect of a superhero story? Rationality and explanation. Superhero stories mostly just get to be what they are. Really? A radioactive spider? Okay! You're from the Planet Krypton? Sure! You can fly? Why not? In fact, that question is the central difference between a superhero comic and a realist narrative; when we read texts with the expectation that they exist in our world and function by our rules, we ask why. When we read a superhero comic, we ask why not. There are lots of things that make Tintin a superhero.

sidekick (Snowy) who provides comic relief and gets him into and out of scrapes
invincibility (seriously, nothing kills this guy)
a mild-mannered outward appearance (though not a secret identity)
a job -- reporter -- that he NEVER EVER DOES
strength, cunning, and honour
an excellent lead hook

Once upon a time, Chris Sims created the Elements of a Superhero, and I think there's an argument to be made that Tintin embodies elements 1, 4, 7, 11, 29, 30, 45, 47, 54, and 71. For example... Invincibility (with superheroic sound effects!): Also, the comical black-and-white nature of good and evil in the villains echo those of Jack Kirby-era comics: And the amazingly unperilous peril (seriously, there is at least one panel like this one in every Tintin comic ever): (don't worry too much -- he figures it out EVERY SINGLE TIME) See, when I was reading the comics as even vague representations of realism, they were infuriating. Once I accepted that Tintin is a superhero, and thus the laws applying to you and I do not apply to him, I was able to relax into the ridiculous scenarios and enjoy the ride. He has to be a superhero for the framing and conceit to work. This is the power of the expectations we have around genre, and a reminder of how much the assumptions we bring to a text shape our understanding of it. But I still think Tintin should wear tights.

#52 "Here I am": Tintin Before the Great Divide

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:00:23 +0000

A few things: this post is about the first Tintin adventure serialized starting on January 10, 1929. The collected serial has come to us English readers, and in subsequent French editions, in black and white only because Hergé did not go back and redo the storyline for a collected, colour, edition as he did for his other Tintin stories. With the these bibliographic details out of the way, let’s dive into why I think this book is important as an artifact of the modernist movement in the arts; an aesthetic, cultural, and social movement that took hold in the early part of the twentieth century, particularly the year 1922 when James Joyce published Ulysses, T. S. Eliot let fly with The Waste Land, and Virginia Woolf gave us the poetic prose of Jacob’s Room. Modernism, to put it excessively crudely and generally, can be broken down into three main features: 1) aesthetic experimentation with ways of representing the relationship between form and subject, 2) an outlook on modern life that grapples with the emergence of new technologies, consumerism, and popular (mass) culture, 3) a renewed social awareness that tended to foster both pessimism and optimism, depending on the context; the world was either nearing its end, or on the precipice of its zenith. Perhaps the most profound result of all these features collapsing around a single focus is a tendency to understand the era as fraught with terrors and self-realizations that could not be represented or reconciled, where everything seemed to be fracturing, causing a divide between past and present, reality and perception, that would never be traversed. The subjects of modernity are marked by upheaval and confusion, and the experience of it must be captured as such, as a kind of decent into the maelstrom. At first blush, the presence of an aesthetic principle that attempts to reconcile or represent the tremors of modern life is completely absent from Hergé’s story about a boy-reporter and his dog. Tintin in the Land of the Soviets is notable if only because it is essentially a Western propaganda vehicle for revealing Soviet propaganda--the proverbial black kettle.

The sequencing of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets is hard to follow. The narrative is loosely strung together and when read in a collected edition rather than as a serial, it seems fractured, haphazard and unstructured. The episodic plotting of the collected edition mimics the vaudeville show with its repeated gags and zippy one-liners; it keeps the audience engaged through its cyclical momentum but doesn’t leave much room for drama, mystery or character development. That said, for all its faults, the book does one thing really well: it consistently locates Tintin in this fractured, frantically-paced, disparate world in which he finds himself. And, its episodic plot would seem to mimic the frenetic pace of modern life where one perception is immediately followed by another perception, and where the deus ex machina that comes to the rescue is decidedly technological.

Hergé spends a good deal of aesthetic capital revealing the instances of Soviet corruption and ineptitude at the expense of telling a good story. In fact, one could argue that unlike most other Tintin adventures, there is no story here. Instead, we have a series of episodes that rely on a similarity of subject—the land of the soviets—for their cohesion, and there’s not much of that either. Tintin’s first run-in with undue authoritarianism actually happens in Berlin during the book’s first 10 pages, not at the hands of the unreasonable Soviets. In short, it would be a big stretch to assume that Hergé is really doing anything interesting with the story in terms of metaphoric layering, or even when it comes to the most surface of declarations about the realities of the Soviet system. That said, what the Soviet system does provide is a metaphor for the fractured, unfamiliar experience of modern life. Tintin metaphorically journeys up the river and into the heart of darkness where strangeness and otherness exist in their natural state. The opportunity afforded by this journey into the heart of darkness allows Herge to draw upon some of the experiential challenges of modern life while at the same time providing stability for one’s experience of it. Tintin navigates his way through the technological world with aplomb and resurfaces again and again with the affirmative “here I am.”

Along with his repetition of “here I am,” Tintin persistently visually signals “here I am” when he addresses the audience directly offering a moment of reflection and stability in the otherwise amped-up madcap journey through Soviet Russia. The sequential pace also slows when Tintin is the detached observer of the struggling Soviet state, hands clasped behind his back he comments and observes rather than participates, slowing things down, suggesting a psychological inertia that allows him to comprehend his environment rather than merely experience it. Hergé seems to reconcile the onset of technological experience with the medium itself. He offers an intriguing play on the comic gutter (and the fourth wall) when he shows Tintin fighting off a group of would-be attackers entering his room. He exploits the comic's framed page to interesting effect (the gutter is both a figurative door to the unseen activities between actions and a division between the different "rooms" where action takes place), but at the same time Hergé uses the dividing line—or gutter—between the characters and their respective ideologies.

Hergé’s episodic plot seems ideally suited to jumping over the space between panels, leaping the gutters without regard for narrative structure much as Eliot shifts from voices, to Sanskrit, to noises, to myth in The Waste Land without the traditional markers of formal narrative development. At the same time, the props that keep the journey in the story moving are technological. He journeys not by horse (he tries to, but the horse throws him off), or by sled, but by cars, a train, a boat, a diving suit, and a plane. For all its failings, the Soviet state is not bereft of the technological (and mechanical) marvels that supposedly instigate the fractured environment in which modernism situates itself; the fractured environment in which experiences seem to be other worldly, perception thrown out of whack, certainties uncertain.

In fact, the dominate metaphor of Tintin’s exploration—and I use that term "exploration" lightly—is a commentary about how technologies offer a way out of the “other world”; a way of escaping a strange, perceptively different, world. It even suggests that some of the technological marvels of mass production (with their constantly leaky petrol) and endless productivity may well be a sham—it wasn’t only the Soviets selling the idea of infinite progress in 1929.

Perhaps the most optimistic takeaway from Tintin in the Land of the Soviets is that serendipity is always present—there is always a plan, it just hasn’t been discovered yet. Nothing is actually haphazard, it just appears that way. Tintin, introduced as he is for the first time in this comic sequence foregrounding his encounter with the Soviet state, is the quintessential modern figure: satiric, adventurous, mechanically inclined. Above all, however, he never thinks too much about reconciling his current perceptions with traditional perceptions. He simply pushes forward, recovering, discovering, existing in the serendipity of the moment in which he finds himself. Through it all, Tintin offers what is perhaps the most salient comment about locating oneself in the constantly shifting, fractured, environment of the early twentieth century: “here I am.”

Work Cited

Hergé. Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. Trans: Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner. London: Methuen, 1991. Print.

#54 Who Needs a Secret Identity Anyway? Tintin as Pedagogy

admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:37:12 +0000

I have to admit that I wasn’t too familiar with Tintin before we agreed to work with Herge’s (or, more correctly, Georges Remi’s) texts on Graphixia, beyond the general “story of a boy and his dog” motif. These young adult texts, notoriously popular in Europe and the world over, however, have a diverse readership have been translated into what is apparently every language known to man (including – holy snakes – Latin!) and number to date more than 200 million copies of the twenty-four titles of the Tintin graphic novels worldwide, with the upcoming movie likely adding greatly to that already substantial figure. Given that Tintin seems to be so widely celebrated in such a cross cultural way, to what can we attribute this overwhelming success? Is there something Platonic about the material that speaks to coming of age that condenses the nuances of cultural experience? What is it about Herge’s formula that can account for the incredible staying power of a character who at first appears like a typical do-gooder teen? Interestingly, and as our previous week’s post noted, the answer may lie in some of the many tropes that the typical superhero comic book follows as well. Tintin, a young newspaper reporter, has a nose for trouble that always seems to stem from a desire to do good and correct inequities that he sees in the world, from ensuring that a celebrated astronomer gets his due for a groundbreaking discovery to foiling criminal schemes in the forging of currency. This, however, is only where the texts begin – Tintin appears in the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time, and it is his compulsion for both justice and mystery that acts as the catalyst for the adventure that follows. These adventures typically follow a byzantine tangle of subplots reminiscent of the most popular of Victorian literature which often lead to nowhere, with action that is fast paced and, at times, almost frenetic. Because of this, the texts can sometimes be difficult to follow, as they incorporate random asides of vaudevillian slapstick and peripheral information to keep the readers’ interest – this style of storytelling is hardly surprising, given Tintin’s original format of the newspaper serial which required consistent cliffhangers in order to keep readers coming back for more. We can see the same style in modern graphic novels that collect comics that were originally published serially, with overly suspenseful moments coming consistently at every twenty-two pages like clockwork. Though these cliffhangers compel readers, however, it is more likely the larger pedagogical and thematic elements of Tintin that contribute to its success. The strength of Tintin, arguably at first glance blasé, static and predictably noble character in and of himself, comes from the failure of the outside social environment in protecting a worldview based on justice and adherence to a moral order. The authorities in Tintin are not only repeatedly bumbling, but they interfere with Tintin’s own investigations, aligning the reader with the protagonist and against the “authorities” through recognition of the desire for corrective measures regarding society’s more properly acknowledged guardians of justice. It is this recognition that drives both Tintin as well as mainstream superhero comics, as it was really the cause for the advent of the superhero on the whole: the rise of an individual, inherent sense of morality that is required to offset the frequent ineptitude of those we rely on to run society for us. As can be seen in the Tintin adventure “The Black Island,” often whole pages are devoted to highlighting the incompetence of police officers, firemen and those we would put our faith in to ensure that moral order is being maintained. Trapped inside a burning building, Herge draws attention to the events outside of the structure as the authorities fumble about trying to find its key, risking Tintin's life as he lies unconscious inside. Tintin is successful in spite of these characters, and one could claim that it is knowledge of their inevitable failure that compels him to action in the first place. There are, of course, many other factors that make The Adventures of Tintin exciting reads, such as the exotic locales that he ventures to, the exploration of others’ cultural values, the thrill of multiple adventures contained within a single text. There are also aspects of Herge’s opus that invite scholarship on an academic level, from noting the postcolonial undertones that run throughout, to the sense of noblesse oblige that underlies the apparently moneyed Tintin as he spends a fortune in seeing that wrongs are righted. Underpinning all of these, however, lies the superhero’s impetus for action that draws from the failings of the world to live up to the greater expectations of the moral individual, and as a teaching tool, Tintin forces the young reader to call into question the omnipotence of the various authorities that would guide the collective hand of society both legally and morally. Tintin can be applauded most, however, in the significant way that he actually differs from the classic superhero text, in that he does not have a secret identity that he returns to after he continuously saves the day – he makes the right choices at a cost to his personal safety and his reputation as the authorities consistently label him a troublemaker and often a criminal himself as they misconstrue his actions. One might call Tintin a true hero in this regard, even more than a Superman or a Batman, as he struggles for the collective and individual good with the whole of his being, unperturbed how these actions will appear to others and without the safety net of an alternate identity to retreat into when things go awry. Despite the social conventions (and those figures put in place to uphold them) that limit truth and justice that get in his way, Tintin proves himself to be the kind of modern hero who questions authority in pursuit of what he sees as the greater good. Work Cited Herge. The Adventures of Tintin: The Black Island. Trans: Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner. London: Egmont, 2002.

#55 Blackout/Whiteout: The Sublime Memory of Youth in Jason’s Hey, Wait...

admin — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:00:48 +0000

"Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell" -- Walter Benjamin (qtd. in Brooks 22) In Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks writes:

Perhaps it would be best to speak of the anticipation of retrospection as our chief tool in making sense of narrative, the master trope of its strange logic. We have no doubt foregone eternal narrative ends, and even traditional nineteenth-century ends are subject to self-conscious endgames, yet still we read in the spirit of confidence, and also a state of dependence, that what remains to be read will restructure the provisional readings of the already read (23).

Norwegian comics artist Jason's Hey, Wait... certainly “restructures the provisional readings of the already read” : what initially appears as childhood nostalgia transforms into a more poignant loss, as Jason organizes Hey, Wait... around the death of Bjorn, the main character’s best friend. This death not only affects what comes after it--Jon’s loneliness, alcoholism and failure--but restructures what comes before it: our readerly identification with Jon’s childhood invokes our own memories, whose sweetness Bjorn’s death obliterates because his death is the death of childhood itself, and a reminder that nostalgia for youth is constituted by the horizon of death. All the earmarks of a boy's childhood in the 1970s appear in the first half as Jon and Bjorn tread the fine line between boredom and idyll. John draws pictures of Batman when his lessons get dull. He is attracted to a girl, Ingrid, but is deathly afraid of speaking to her. He and Bjorn talk about a guy who has "done it," try to decide what to do on long summer days, and perform various pranks. And yet, Jason manages to avoid cliche by dislocating reality; this is a world in which humanoid dogs and birds are the main actors, where pairs of wooden stilts replace cars, and pterodactyls snatch kites from the air. This deviation from realism renders nostalgia familiar but strange: uncanny. This uncanniness extends to the figure of Death, who appears in the first half as a schoolyard bully and as a passing cyclist who waves at Jon. We don’t know that he is Death until we read the second part. He appears ragged and skull-like, but because we are already in this slightly distorted world, we don’t necessarily make the connection until his role becomes more obvious. Hey, Wait... is one of a long line of non-superhero comics that reflects on its relationship to that genre. Bjorn’s death emerges in the gap between the superhero's world and mundane reality; it results from Jon suggesting that they ought to create a Batman club. This club would require a test for membership: leaping up to and swinging from a branch above a cliff to prove one’s courage. Jon illustrates the test without difficulty. While Bjorn initially demurs, he screws up his courage for another day. Alas, he fails where Jon succeeds and falls to his death. Bjorn’s death also kills Batman and all that Batman represents for Jon and maybe for us; the escapism of that comic book world is no longer possible. The second part jumps many years forward in Jon’s life. He lives on his own in an apartment. He has a child but appears to be separated, if not divorced, from his wife. Adulthood for him is all drudgery--his job is to drill holes in cubes--regret, and remorse. His adulthood betrays his childhood. In part one Bjorn and Jon spend a summer's day discussing what they will do with their adult lives: “One thing’s for sure,” Bjorn notes, “I’m not gonna work in a factory or someplace boring like that.” “Nope,” Jon responds. For Jon, the transition from part one to part two is one from a world where everything seems possible to one where nothing seems possible--a world stripped of its Batmanness. The post-Batman world restructures the meaning of Jon's innocent childhood doodles. We reinterpret our initial response to them as they become weighty portents of a future where they have no place. If Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth is about how superheroes plague comics, about how we can’t get rid of them even though they do not serve any useful purpose, Hey, Wait... both implicates Batman in Bjorn’s death and mourns his passing as a kind of collateral damage. Batman becomes part of a memory that death converts from sweet to sublime--unthinkable and unrepresentable. The only way to indicate this sublimity is with the full page of six blacked-out panels that appear immediately after Bjorn makes his jump. In the second half of the book we see a corresponding page of white panels when Jon gets drunk. The braiding of the two pages establishes the text’s relationship to memory: first a blackout and then a whiteout. These two pages may be the most important in the book, yet there is "nothing" on either of them. The black panels indicate the end of a world. The white panels show the irony of that world’s continuance in memory and Jon’s inability to erase it except through dying himself: the final page shows him boarding a bus full of the dead. While boarding that bus provides a form of closure for Jon, we readers of Hey, Wait... remain caught in a kind of limbo between the two halves of the book...as if we have been tricked. We thought we were getting one kind of story--a childhood idyll--but ended up with another--a story of adult misery. Our suspension gives the book’s title its full meaning. Jon utters the phrase as Bjorn leaps for the branch that ought to confer upon him membership in the Batman club. We can even imagine that the phrase itself causes Bjorn to miss the branch, as it interrupts and throws off his leap. But we keep saying “Hey, Wait...” to ourselves, to the book, and to life itself well after Bjorn has died, because “Hey, Wait...” is not simply a call for someone else to pause; it is a sign of missing something and then getting it--a joke that one doesn’t quite understand the punchline to starts to become clear.

Works Cited

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1992. Jason. Hey, Wait.... Ed and trans: Kim Thompson. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2001.

#56 Alternate History and Monkeying with Memory: Mark Millar's Superman: Red Son

admin — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 14:00:18 +0000

Superman comics are my kryptonite. See what I did there? Usually I don't love Superman. He's too perfect. It's annoying. I like my superheroes flawed and fallible. But, I also like alternate histories, so I was eager to dig in to Superman: Red Son. I enjoy playing in the possibilities of what-if and what-might-have-been. One of the things I love about the established characters in the DC and Marvel universe is that because their (albeit fictional, I guess) history is well known and accepted, alternate histories are, of course, a common place to play with storylines. Ultimately, alternate history depends on memory. If you don't or can't recollect the narrative that the alternative history is "riffing" on, you can't make sense of the purpose of the retelling. It stops being an alternate history and starts being, like, I don't know. A story. And you can get a story any old damn place. Alternate history is special. DC has an imprint devoted to alternate history. They call it Elseworlds, which is a great friggin' name. Superman: Red Son is part of this imprint; it's a three-issue one-shot (that can't be the right word for this) by Mark Millar with art by Dave Johnson, Killian Plunkett, Andrew Robinson, and Walden Wong. The premise is pretty straightforward: what if Superman's capsule had crashed not in Kansas, but in the Ukraine under Soviet rule? Superman is no longer the protector of the American Way, but instead a figure devoted to the goals of Stalinist communism and committed to globalizing the Soviet Union. If your first response to that idea was OH SNAP, then your first response was correct. Oh snap, indeed. (It's awesome is what I'm saying.) Also, you know it's an alternate history because Green Lantern becomes the hope for mankind. I mean, seriously. Please never let that happen, universe. Okay, but I was supposed to talk about memory (1). As I mentioned, alternate history, if it works, is predicated on memory, and that's certainly true here. It's only unsettling to consider Superman in Stalin's hands if you have some framework for understanding both those concepts in their accepted historical context. On a macro level, the whole thing collapse if your memory fails you. On a micro level, these alternate histories within established comic world only work if you're versed in the lore. Lois Luthor only makes your heart sink, and CIA operative Jimmy Olsen only delights you, if you know the backstory. When Superman, in a quest for a utopia, turns the Soviet people into an unthinking and incapable mass, a reader without the proper framework might see this as a case of a character overreaching in support of his ideals. Superman fans, though, know that this is a perversion of the values Superman has stood for. Without that backstory, Superman's climactic exit makes no sense. For Marvel and DC, alternate histories are gifts to the hardcore fans, a way of demonstrating that the amount of intellectual energy they (fine, we) spend on keeping track of the characters has been worthwhile. It's a reward for the committed reader's extended dedication to memory. Because I was thinking about how memory frames and drives these kinds of stories, I was interested to see the extent to which memory is the motivating force in the actions the characters take. Not Superman, so much, as he is motivated by his ideals. But Batman, in this version, is motivated to destroy Superman (2) because his parents were killed by the head of the KGB; the memory of the night of their murder haunts him and leads him to seek to destroy Superman as a representative of that regime. Lois Lane, trapped in a SURPRISE unhappy marriage to Lex Luthor, is haunted by the memory of Superman's face; even as she believes her government's propaganda about commie Superman, she finds it hard to release these feelings and it shapes her response to him at the end of the text. Wonder Woman, betrayed by Superman, is motivated by the echoing memory of that betrayal to help attempt to destroy Superman. And visually, we're alerted to the importance of all these (and other) moments of memory through the use of a chiaroscuro fog effect in the panels -- we revisit the scenes visually at significant moments where memory becomes a motivator. It's a little frying-pan-over-the-head once you start looking for it, but it works. Memory is important to Superman: Red Son both in content and form. And the cool thing about alternate histories is that the reader's memory of the alternate history itself shapes the reading of future "normal" history comics in the series. The interaction is fluid and variable, as anything based in memory is wont to be. Just don't think too hard about the end of Superman: Red Son (3). -- Endnotes: (1) If, when you read my posts, you get the feeling that I'm the adorable but slightly less intellectually fortunate member of this ensemble cast, you're not wrong. If Graphixia was Friends, I would be a literate Joey. Which is just Phoebe I guess. I don't know, I haven't seen the show in a decade. OMG, me, stop typing! (2) For women who dig superheroes, this matchup is akin to that scene in Bridget Jones' Diary where Colin Firth and Hugh Grant fight each other. Hashtag fantastic. (3) Don't read this until you've read the comic. What do we do with the fact that Millar sets us up for a repeat and the entire plot becomes cyclical? Lois Lane and Lex Luthor become Superman's ancestors, right? Like, his great-great-great-to-the-power-of-a-lot grandparents? So Superman is hot for Grandma Lois? I TOLD YOU NOT TO THINK ABOUT IT TOO MUCH. You can't unthink these thoughts! -- Works Cited Millar, Mark et al. Superman: Red Son. New York: DC Comics, 2004.

#57 Between the Set-Up and the Punchline

admin — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:00:50 +0000

Superhero comics remind us about things we’ve missed in a story or things we may not have context to understand through editorial interjections, or annotations. Those little boxes, usually at the bottom of a panel, indicated by a "*" and often signed “Eds” or "The Editors," help us make sense of something happening in a story that relates to a previous event that we might not remember or that we missed because we never read the issue. They help us work out the continuity of on-going story-lines or, more often, the explanation being offered by a character in response to an event the “Eds” remind us of. The interesting part about these editorial interjections isn’t that they exist, but that they almost always refer us back to another issue. They don’t “tell” us anything. Instead, they point us in the right direction, essentially allowing us to cross-reference and find out why a character is saying or doing what s/he is doing. [*Here’s a great article about these editorial annotations. Eds.] By foregrounding the action of going back to an earlier issue, the editors prioritize the act of re-reading (or filling in for new readers) rather than remembering. We are not so much reminded as redirected to another issue. The gambit is this: the editors don’t want us to actually remember what happened in earlier issues. In fact, they assume we won’t remember and will need to go back and read the previous story (again, maybe) to understand the impetus for a character action or claim.

The narrative and story (yes, both) in comics function on a principle of not remembering. Even characters don’t usually remember what they did in previous issues unless it’s a continued storyline or story arc. The act of a character referring to something in the past by remembering is so unique that an editor often needs to interject to remind the reader where this memory was created or worse, justify the need for reintroducing the character again:

In other words, the interjections suggest that memory isn’t that important in superhero comics. Or, if it is important—Batman’s fixation on his parent’s murder for example—it must be portrayed in a static version, unchanging and never fully understood or resolved. A single memory might be the impetus for a lifetime of crime fighting, but a compendium of other memories does not infiltrate upon that initial memory. There’s no growth, no depth, no working toward understanding and resolution. If, as Jean-Paul Sartre suggests, "the past is the ever growing totality of the in-itself which we are" (Sartre 167), then what exactly are superheroes? Sure, Batman’s past is the totally of the “in-itself that he is,” but I would hardly call it “ever growing.” Superman doesn’t seem to remember anything other than that Mr. Mxyzptlk needs to say his name backwards. Even then, he often comes to the memory late, or is reminded by someone else (often comically the villain his/herself). In short, one of the things superheroes tend to represent is a perspective that dismisses all but the most epic of memories in favour of repetition and routine—they have many habits and they rely on them to get them through most situations. Superhero comics rely on what Umberto Eco calls iterative development: “A series of events repeated according to a set scheme (iteratively, in such a way that each event takes up again from a sort of virtual beginning, ignoring where the preceding event left off)” (Eco 19). He goes on to suggest that “the device of iteration is […] where one distractedly watches the playing out of a sketch then focuses one's attention on the punch line that re-appears at the end of the episode. It is precisely on this foreseen and awaited reappearance that our modest but irrefutable pleasure is based" (Eco 19). It strikes me that an iterative narrative actually encourages the reader toward habit, away from close reading and scrutiny. The point of all this is that the comics rely on the reader not only suspending disbelief (a flying guy, really?), but also suspending the affect memory exerts on our reading processes. Most would agree that the more you read, the better you read. Readers tend to pick up references, sink into the stylistics of the genre, navigate disruptions in convention more easily, as they take in more and make themselves informed readers. Comics books pressure the reassurances and certainties that come from habit. Comics force us to forget in order to enjoy the nuances of the repeated story. The superhero is then miming the interpretive methodology that comics encourage, one that relies on comfort in repetition rather than the challenges of discursiveness. Superheroes are not great models for critical thinking; they are terrible learners.

That said, comics occupy a unique position in that they also encourage the encyclopedic hoarding of discreet facts. I'm looking at you comic book nerd. Despite the necessity of forgetting, readers--especially those who are particularly committed to one character / hero--remember, with sometimes maddening detail, the obscure variations, temporal slips, fractures in continuity, purposeful refigurings featured within the on-going, repeated, narrative. The action of remembering in comics then has little to do with how the stories engage with the memory of the characters or the event in which they have been involved. Comics, unlike other media that seem to demand attention be paid to the singularity of events that led up to the current "situation" or climax, engage memory when there is discontinuity, in the subtle turns and twists between the set-up and the punchline. For the seasoned reader, the superhero comic book—and the characters who dwell within it—are precisely “the ever growing totality of the in-itself which we are.” Without the reader’s memory of comics themselves, and the position of those stories in the reader’s psyche, there is no history, no memory. The comic book narrative becomes a fortress of interpretive solitude. To recast Eco's claim, the interpretive action of reading a comic book creates a space in which the personal past of the reader blends with the past iterations of the character. While the narrative sequence and story may be repeated, the reader's past is locked in the moment of encounter. And, the repeated encounters with these narratives and stories yield an intimate history in which the reader's past "is the ever growing totality" in-between the set-up and the punchline; it is the memory.

Works Cited

Eco, Umberto. “The Myth of Superman.” Trans. Natalie Chilton. Diacritics. 2.1 (Spring 1972): 14-22. Print. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Basic Writings. Ed. Stephen Priest. New York, Routledge: 2001. Print.

#58 Manipulating Memories: Jason Aaron’s PunisherMax

admin — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 18:12:17 +0000

As we’ve seen these past few weeks in Graphixia, memory plays multiple roles in the shaping of comics’ narratives, operating on many levels both for the characters as well as for the mainstay readers of comics themselves. The detailed histories presented in long-running serials present challenges for the authors in ensuring accuracy, offer avenues to reinvent characters in innovative ways that are compelling precisely because they defy expectation and standardization, and are played upon in order to highlight the import of certain events through editorial commentary to build upon stories or negate others in order to pursue a static, unchanging representation of the superhero archetype. The multiple functions of memory create overwhelmingly diverse ways in which comics can be both written and read, making long-running comics compelling both for the casual reader as well as the literary critic alike. Jason Aaron’s very recent (and still running, for one more issue at least) PunisherMax exploits this multiple use of memory in highly innovative and intriguing ways, playing against readers’ expectations and reshaping a long-standing Marvel character to reinvigorate him for a new generation that has greater expectations of comics as a more literary genre. This series, begun in January of 2010, rebooted Punisher under Marvel’s “Max” imprint – much like DC’s “Elseworlds,” creators here are given free rein to rework, reestablish and reinvent characters as they see fit, with the added incentive of not having to adhere to any sort of established comics’ code. As a result, these Max comics (earmarked for adults only) are often rife with graphic violence, sexuality and expressly adult themes; while these features may not be positives for many readers, they do allow for a diverse range of authors whose talents would not otherwise be used to full advantage in more mainstream comics writing, such as Warren Ellis, and darker, more adult tales from fan (and critic) favorites Straczynski and Bendis. Aaron’s work on Punisher, gritty and explicit, certainly belongs under the Max imprint, his stories becoming all the more gripping and memorable because of their gratuitous nature. The Punisher as a character is an exemplar of how memory motivates heroes and compels them to action. Like many others, Punisher (aka Frank Castle) is haunted by the death of his family, who in his case were gunned down in a public park during a sunny afternoon picnic – he himself survived the attack, which led him to pursue vengeance on all criminals who would do the same to others. He is not, however, only haunted by the memory of the death of his family; Castle is also an ex-Marine, shell-shocked and distraught from the legalized atrocities he both witnessed and performed as a soldier during the Vietnam War. Different authors who have handled Punisher in the past have treated these as separate motivators, with Castle being either vengeful at the death of his wife and children, or a disgruntled soldier who has returned with a compulsion to exact vengeance on wrongdoing through the methods that his government has legitimized in a wartime environment. Aaron, however, condenses these perspectives and plays to both, integrating them to come up with a more comprehensive – and far more complex – vision of what drives the Punisher. He co-ordinates this reinvestigation of Castle’s character through reworking his nemeses’ pasts while reintroducing them for a new audience, making their pasts his own. PunisherMax begins in medias res, with Castle having already established himself as a counterforce against his city’s criminal element, having been in operation for some thirty years. Presented as an old man nearing the end of his run as a hero, Castle is slipping up and making mistakes, leaving witnesses behind and not ensuring that all of his criminal targets have been killed. Here is where Aaron introduces his once-familiar nemeses, presented in this Max universe for the first time as new threats that the wizened Castle must deal with. The first arc, “Kingpin,” shows Wilson Fisk’s introduction and rise as the crime boss of Castle’s city. Aaron explores Fisk’s history by oscillating between past and present, with no familiar acknowledgement that he’s indicating a flashback – the effect is jolting to the reader who is left with the implication that the past so informs the present that no editorial box indicating the shift is necessary. Over the course of the five issue arc, Fisk’s story parallel’s Castle’s, even in the way that the panels are constructed: This construction has the dual effect of showing the characters’ similar paths and motivations, both born in violence and taking their city by force, and foreshadowing a similar narrative structure for Castle’s own explorative arc later in the series. We are left at the end of this five issue introduction with a Kingpin who has risen to the top of the city’s criminal empire through manipulation, violence, deceit and, importantly, the sacrifice of his family – when his son is taken hostage by the crime boss Fisk is designing to replace, he apologizes to the boy and allows him to die so his own career as Kingpin can begin. Fisk and Castle are here set up as dual sides of the same persona and motivators, a fact that Aaron explores more fully in subsequent arcs. The second arc, being “Bullseye,” reintroduces another of Castle’s nemeses – the titular character having been hired by Fisk to eliminate Castle. While the reader expects immediate action, however, we are forced to wait for several issues for it to occur; Bullseye, despite clearly being portrayed as a violent psychopath, studies Castle’s motivations and personal history in order to find a flaw through which he can end his life. The reader explores this past with Bullseye, and the importance of memory as motivation becomes far more salient as the arc progresses. Bullseye conducts torturous “interviews” with the only prompt being “tell me what Castle is like,” and he sleeps on the graves of Castle’s murdered family in order to try to understand his character. Bullseye goes so far as to attempt to relive the traumatic event of Castle’s family being killed in the park by kidnapping a similar family, forcing them to play along as he assumes the role of “loving” father, and then having them executed in the same setting in an attempt to replicate the event and feel the same compelling motivation for vengeance. All of these attempts fail, however, and Bullseye comes to the same realization that a hero cannot, as is commonly assumed, be explained away by a singular event as many other popular comics would have us believe: This skewing of the normal approach of pigeonholing a hero by a single motivator is further highlighted by Castle himself. Discussing his next plan of attack, he interrupts his own conversation with an acknowledgement of his own failing memory: The reader now sees how complex memory is as a motivator – we are left with a convoluted vision of what drives characterization and how challenging it can be to reconcile our actions with even the events that we feel have shaped our own lives, let alone how challenging it is for others to define us by our pasts. Bullseye ultimately becomes near comatose for an entire issue of the arc while attempting to rationalize Castle’s convictions, struggling (verbally, for the reader’s benefit) with his character but metatextually also with the apparently irreconcilable ways that Punisher has been presented by past authors: if Punisher was born in the bloodied jungles of Vietnam, why could he not detect a trap set for his family in a city park and thereby save them? Aaron here toys with memory on two fronts, making readers question not only Castle’s impetus for action, but the illogical and simplistic way that we have understood him in the past. The final confrontation at the end of the arc sees Bullseye having uncovered the “truth” about Castle, summed up in his family’s final day at the park and what Castle said to his wife and children right before they were murdered. Bullseye assumes that there must have been some significant distraction to cause Castle to fail to recognize the danger he was in and, with a hand at his throat, Bullseye reveals the correct answer to the question of what was going through Castle’s mind on the day of the tragedy. Aaron leaves this to the reader’s imagination, however, making the dialogue balloon too small for us to see – we acknowledge the wide eyes of the startled Punisher on realizing that some horrible truth has been uncovered, but we are not privy to this information. Even after the buildup to this final confrontation, to sum up Castle’s character in a single line is still too easy a response for Aaron (and too easy a response for his readers). Instead, he uses this single unreadable balloon as the impetus for his entire arc to follow, titled “Frank.” In this penultimate arc for the series, Aaron shows us through the structure of the book just how significant memory is both for comics’ characters themselves as well as for the reading audience. Each issue shifts seamlessly between past and present in exploring Frank Castle’s past, detailing his time in Vietnam and his home life on his return, juxtaposed with the present Castle being stuck in prison. As the arc progresses, more and more pages of each issue are devoted to exploring Castle’s motivations, all leading up to the fateful day in the park and the revelation of Castle’s final words to his wife right before she was killed. By the final issue of the arc, the flashbacks are no longer, strictly speaking, flashbacks: they open the issue and comprise the bulk of its pages, and Castle’s past is where the more interesting of the two stories is contained. The past here supplants the present, and the reader is aware that Castle’s memories are what inform his present to the degree that it is overtaken, the present being only a trivial aftereffect of the complex formative events that made him the hero he has become – when Aaron finally reveals that Castle had told his wife, seconds before her death, that he was leaving her because of his struggles with post-traumatic stress and “pretending [he’s] something [he’s] not,” we not only feel more greatly informed of his motivations in Aaron’s rendition of PunisherMax but are forced to rethink all we know of the Punisher as a character, through every story in which we have ever encountered him. Aaron shows us that Castle is not haunted by an event that occurred to him, either through the Vietnam War or through the murder of his family, but by the memory of a single decision that occurred within him, vocalized only at the last moment of his normal life. He is haunted by his own failure as a father, as a husband and as a soldier who either failed to recognize the imminent attack or, as Aaron subtly implies, allowed it to happen to release him from the bondage of being a workaday family man. He is tormented by the guilt that no reader, until this moment, ever thought that this seemingly black and white character was capable of: on finally admitting the truth of the event, Castle tells the reader against the backdrop of a gruesome flashback of his family’s death, “The thing that haunts me now isn’t the moment they died. The moment my daughter’s belly exploded and my son’s brains came out the back of his head. No, it’s the moment right before that, when I had everything… And I threw it all away. There was a time when I wish I’d died with them that day. But I know the reason I survived. It wasn’t so I could seek revenge in their name. So I could wage my little war.” With the images shifting into the present, he continues, “It was so I could suffer … A lifetime of punishment ... It will never be enough” (Aaron 16, 7-8). Ultimately, Aaron turns the entire character on his head, in all of his past incarnations, by revealing that the reason that Castle became the Punisher at all was to punish himself. The series concludes, just as Aaron foreshadowed, in the final arc titled “Homeless,” with the Punisher and Kingpin killing each other, neither character ultimately able to come to terms with their irreconcilable past. Castle dies on the steps of his family’s long-abandoned home; even in his final act, he forfeits the present in order to return to his motivations and his guilt over his personal failures. These final panels of PunisherMax vacillate consistently between past and present, leaving the reader unsure as to which story Aaron is more intent on telling. Though it is difficult to sum up the merits of an entire series in a single post, Aaron’s deft handling of characterization in PunisherMax exemplifies how significant a theme memory can be in understanding comics. In manipulating the memories of both his readers and his characters, Aaron shows us that even the most static, morally rigid heroes can be overwhelmingly complex if provided the right treatment and if we choose to see past archetypal renderings of familiar protagonists. By closely juxtaposing hero and villain, employing flashbacks to an extent rarely seen in mainstream comics and forcing us to see the past as present, he provides a depth to the Punisher that, on rereading, resonates into previous incarnations of the character without conflicting with other authors’ stories. His work on the series is “retconning,” or employing retroactive continuity, at its most impressive: Aaron takes a character who is fueled by memory and exploits this fact to revision the most fundamental attributes of what compels him to action, showing us that memory for a fictional character can be just as complex as it is in the “real” world. In Aaron’s refusal to understand his characters as two dimensional and stock, we are reminded that even superhero archetypes can – and likely should – be approached with the same critical eye with which we address all characters in literature. Their memories, like our own, reveal much about their actions in the present and inform every story in which we encounter them. Works Cited Aaron, Jason et. al. PunisherMax no 1. January 2010. Print. Aaron, Jason et. al. PunisherMax no 3. March 2010. Print. Aaron, Jason et. al. PunisherMax no 7. July 2010. Print. Aaron, Jason et. al. PunisherMax no 1. August 2011. Print. Aaron, Jason et. al. PunisherMax no 11. May 2011. Print. Aaron, Jason et. al. PunisherMax no 16. October 2011. Print.

#61 Melmoth: The Wildean Pause in the Cerebus Narrative

Grayb — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 12:43:12 +0000

I love Oscar Wilde. Of course, who doesn't? Announcing an adoration for Wilde is about as controversial as declaring that sunshine is pleasant or cookies are delicious. Are there Oscar haters even out there? I can't imagine it. But I've aways felt a particular affinity for the man, and for a short period in my life considered being a Victorianist exclusively so I could work on Wilde (and then I saw all the other stuff I'd have to read and thought again). So when we decided we were doing a Cerebus cycle, I knew immediately that I was going to focus on issue 6, Melmoth. By the time Melmoth comes along, Cerebus needs some downtime. He believes Jaka is dead and, basically, he's catatonic. And in his state, he ends up at a café near the hotel where Oscar Wilde is living out the last days of his life. "Melmoth" was the alias Wilde lived under in Paris after he was released for Reading Gaol, and that's where the title of this issue comes from. In Cerebus's monomythic cycle of the hero, I suppose this issue fulfills the role of an apotheosis; Cerebus is resting up for his return to battle (though he doesn't know it in the moment). As a result, we get an exquisitely beautiful and touching interlude about the final days of Oscar Wilde's life. Dave Sim intersperses excerpts from Robert Ross's letters about Wilde's declining condition with images of Wilde's suffering body and Cerebus's catatonia. One of the most striking things about this is the way Sim constructs the dying Wilde to be, well, frankly grotesque. Which is, one supposes, as it should be; Wilde is wasting away as he dies slowly and painfully of meningitis. But how often do we see cultural representations of Wilde looking ugly? It's jarring to see a representation of our favourite aesthete brought degraded and low. [caption id="attachment_1426" align="alignnone" width="400" caption="I don't remember Stephen Fry looking like this in the biopic."][/caption] This choice to make Wilde look, well, human and fallible in his death is an interesting one, as is the choice to have this story told not by Cerebus (the protagonist of the larger story) or Wilde himself (ever the performance artist and protagonist in the drama of his own life), but by Robert Ross. Ross, a Canadian journalist and critic, was Wilde's companion in his final days (and off-and-on through his life); Ross is a side-kick figure in the historical record, known more for his role as Wilde's literary executor than for any of his own works. I think this is important. With both our protagonists fallen silent for a time, Ross fills in where neither Cerebus nor Wilde is able. Wilde rendered both silent and ugly is a drastic departure from his cultural role. But it's an important one, given that Sim seems to parallel Wilde's death with Cerebus snapping out of his catatonia. Indeed, it is not until the epilogue that Cerebus finds both voice and action, the very things that Wilde has been robbed of throughout the text. Why? When people talk about the resurgence of interest in Oscar Wilde, especially in the 1990s, they often talk in terms of a resurrection; not a biblical one, of course (though imagine!), but a resurrection of reputation. Wilde was great, then brought low, but is now pretty much universally thought of as great again. His death, paradoxically, became the first step towards his reparation. Likewise, Wilde's death becomes a catalyst for Cerebus's own reanimation; not until after Wilde dies is he able to snap out of his disconnected state. In fact, he sits and witnesses the funeral procession but immediately afterwards drifts off to sleep, seemingly for the first time since his arrival. Wilde's death releases Cerebus into sleep; when he awakens, it is to overhear a conversation that jolts him into deadly action and he is back on his own quest. But Wilde's death spurs on that rebirth, much as it spurred on his own. If you love Oscar Wilde, Melmoth is puzzling and upsetting but ultimately quite moving. Sim forces us to renegotiate some of our ideas about who Wilde was and what his final days were like. There is little of Wilde's wit and whimsy here, and a whole lot of tragedy and sorrow. But it's a choice that both humanizes Wilde and mythologizes Cerebus, allowing them to share in the power of the death of Oscar Wilde.

#59 Disorient/Reorient: Cerebus #20

wilkinsp — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 14:00:12 +0000

I have to admit to knowing almost nothing about Cerebus, Dave Sim’s magnum opus of 300 issues. I have only heard vague rumblings of Sim’s genius and eccentricity. Scott assures me that the series becomes complex and literary, as Brenna’s post on the “Melmoth” Oscar Wilde sequence will show. My problem in writing this post is that I couldn’t just jump to the genius issues. I had to start at the beginning. And the beginning of Cerebus is nothing much: funny animal as Conan the Barbarian about sums it up. Many associate Cerebus with Howard the Duck, a comic that I never read as a kid because it violated my sense of realism, which is funny considering that I read a ton of super hero comics. Apparently, Cerebus began as a parody of the “Sword and Sorcery” genre. It is a truism that in order to parody something, you must understand it in detail. Because I never had any affinity for this genre, a parody of it is more or less meaningless to me. The one time my attention sparked during the first ten issues was when a character spoke in the manner of Foghorn Leghorn from the Warner Brothers cartoons. But I had no idea why an artist would do such a thing. The “accent” seemed as out of place as an aardvark seeking adventure and treasure. Because I was having trouble reading Cerebus in a disciplined way, I decided that the only thing to do was skip ahead. I decided to read every tenth issue, and so jumped to issue #20. This move was fortuitous because this issue marks a key transition for Sim. The serial nature of many comics frequently entails several shifts in approach. The artwork and themes transform over time so that a comic can become radically different from how it started out. Because Cerebus is mostly a one-man work (Gerhard, Sim’s background artist, teamed up with him in 1984) rather than a comic produced by different teams of artists and writers, these transformations bear the mark of an auteur, reflecting Sim’s relationship to comics and the world. Cerebus ultimately shifted to political and religious themes as the comic became less of a genre parody and more the expression of a worldview. Issue #20 is an important step in the development of this worldview. If you unstaple the pages of the comic, you can put them together like a simple jigsaw puzzle so that they form a large image of Cerebus’ body. The dialogue of the issue weaves around this image. As Cerebus moves through the plot of the comic, his relationship to his own body determines which conversation he is in. The comic essentially does away with panels, and plays fast and loose with the left to right, top to bottom reading process. The reader has to do some mental adjustments to his or her comics reading paradigm to follow along. Because Cerebus is drugged, these adjustments correspond with the main character’s predicament; he is initially disoriented and confused. In reorienting the conventional comic reading path, Sim is able to play with ideas of mind and body, inside and outside, and hedonism and austerity. Through the issue, Cerebus conducts two conversations, one with Perce and Wenda, who are “Cirinists,” a group devoted to an austere matriarchal religion opposed to fun of any kind, and one with Suenteus Po, the founder of “Illusionism,” that celebrates intoxication and bodily pleasures. If he is within the outlines of his body, he speaks to Po, while if he is outside of those outlines, he speaks to Perce and Wenda. Apart from Cerebus’ the voices are disembodied, so instead of speech bubbles with tails, we see radiant bubbles for the Cirinists and double-lined bubbles for Suenteus Po. After an initial disorientation, we soon sort out who is speaking and what order we should read in. Our brains are like cameras on autofocus: what was initially blurry becomes clear as the lenses adjust. So, although we depend upon conventions to understand how to read a comic, if those conventions disappear, it does not take us long to figure out the new pattern, as long as there is a pattern. Presumably, most western comics are arranged so that the narrative proceeds from the top right of the page to the bottom left of the page, moving left to right along each row because they emulate text, so the organization of text determines the organization of images. But while there is a necessity that text move in that direction, there is no necessity for images to do so, partly because we don’t read each panel in the same way that we read the sequence of panels. Rather, our eyes move over the panel following the dictates of perspective in art: vanishing points, focal points, and such. Cerebus # 20 is an example of comics that reflects on the medium’s relationship to text and attempts to establish a different visual order. Thus the issue is an exercise in disorienting and re-orienting, so the reader enters an altered state like that a drug might bring on. We can conceive of the struggle between hedonism and austerity that Cerebus mediates in the narrative as also being a struggle between creativity and convention in the comics medium that Sim struggles with to bring this comic out of convention-bound parody into a philosophical and aesthetic space in its own right. Readers of my previous posts will know that one of the things that fascinates me is the presentation of double worlds in comics, the way comics use their mapping of time onto space to create two worlds operating simultaneously. For instance, the world of the super hero and the world of mundane reality. Issue #20 is Cerebrus’ entry into that aspect of comics. Perhaps one the reasons I had trouble getting to grips with Sim’s comic is that the Sword and Sorcery genre, however fantastic, tends to be a one-world genre even in Cerebus’ parodic model. You are either in it or out of it in that Dungeons and Dragons sort of way. Here we see a narrative and artistic doubling that remains patently fantastic, but adds an interesting complexity that goes beyond Foghorn Leghorn voices. Works Cited Sim, Dave. Cerebus: Bi-Weekly. 25 August 1989.

#60 Twelve Covers in Search of a Narrative

admin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 06:17:18 +0000

The artwork in the “Melmoth” sequence of Cerebus is meticulously rendered and puts one in mind of woodcut artists such as Lynd Ward. Coming on the heels of the Jaka’s story sequence and the desolation it creates in Cerebus, who takes up residence at Dino’s and stares into space clutching Jaka’s doll, “Melmoth” is a good, albeit, arbitrary starting point for a discussion of the aesthetics at play in Cerebus. The focus here is on the covers for the “Melmoth” sequence and how they reinforce several aesthetic markers for both the narrative and the characters. Taken together, the covers signal different character and temporal foci while at the same time suggesting the recurring thematic and structural markers for the storyline.

Given the subject-oriented focus of the other “Melmoth” covers, the above two covers might seem like an odd starting point, but they introduce two key components of the artistic iconography: the first is arcs over doorways or windows and the second is close ups that signal a relationship between the iconography and character--in this case, Wilde and flowers. These aesthetic templates repeat themselves throughout the storyline, appearing in nearly every panel in one form or another. The covers then “set the aesthetic tone” for the reader, introducing the key iconographic repetitions into the narrative—one has only to think about the role of the repeated “happy face” in Watchmen for successful applications of such iconographic symbology in constructing narrative sequences in comic books.

The above covers, while maintaining the characteristic rounded doorways and windows, and clustered close-ups or obscured frames, focus on characters in the act of contemplation. Itself a major theme in “Melmoth,” contemplation is of course something the readers of Cerebus must do as we try to penetrate the sometimes restrictive detail of the interior artwork. In short, the cover suggests a reflective narrative that turns inward, signalling Cerebus’ contemplation of Jaka’s death. Of course, the primary figure of death in “Melmoth” is Wilde and the act of contemplation is something he desperately wishes to avoid throughout the narrative. The cover images themselves demand our contemplation, and when taken in concert provide a parallel narrative to the story, suggesting iconic linkages where the story provides literal and allusionary linkages.

Much like the covers that depict characters in the act of contemplation, the covers above suggest exteriors that are tilted and shift according to temporal shifts between Cerebrus’ present and Wilde’s past. The recurring iconography of curves, crossed windows, and gas lamps continues, but the covers expose the different atmospheric conditions of the storyline. At times dark, light, close, far, and empty the covers juxtapose the parallels between Cerebus’ Dino’s Cafe and Wilde’s Hôtel d’Alsace, the presence and absence of humanity, longing and anxiety, bringing the two main characters of the overall sequence into closer relief while at the same time emphasizing similarities in psychological states.

The above covers focus on Wilde and the immediate surroundings of his hotel room. They iconography, at once bright and colourful in contrast to his sickly presence and failing health and dark and shadowy symbolizing his own secrecy and denial. The cover images also bring forward the curved windows and panelled doors, in this case bringing them inside, and set in place the connection between Wilde and flowers (both an allusion to Wilde’s dandyism / sexual orientation and his death). They also vary the perspective of Wilde from cover to cover--close up, from his point of view, and far away from above. The covers represent Wilde's fractured psyche while carrying forward the essential symbology of the narrative arc and the notion that death sets one free, where one can look down on the elegant scene. The repeated iconography crosses over settings when we take the wallpaper into account (the source of perhaps the most famous Wilde quote of all: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to death. One of us has to go” (Ellman 546)). Bringing forward the colour scheme from Wilde’s room, the birds traversing the sky and casting shadows over a contemplative, imbibing, Wilde recall the dominant iconography of the wallpaper and his fast-approaching mortality.

The double-page spread above that dominates the middle of the final episode in Wilde’s narrative arc solidifies the iconography of the covers by bringing together the dominant motifs of the cover images (settings, curves, squares, sitting figures, compressed frames, and a downward walk instead of upward struggle) as it also brings together the two central characters of the broader narrative arc, effectively closing off the Wilde storyline and rejuvenating Cerebus’ storyline. Sequences such as “Melmoth” remind us that covers play an essential role in establishing the iconography central to reading comics. Covers are often teasers—the Cerebus covers are in colour, something the interior is not—both distorting and foreshadowing the content of the book it buttresses. At the same time, they set the important symbology of the narrative, coaxing us to read the content in a particular way, keeping relationships between symbology, the characters, and the narrative they all work to enact. Works Cited Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York. Knopf, 1988. Sim, Dave and Gerhard. Cerebus: Melmoth: A Short Story. October 1990 - August 1991. Issues 139-150.

#62 - Cerebus' "Minds": Dave Sim as God?

smarsden — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 22:17:54 +0000

When I first recommended Dave Sim’s magnum opus Cerebus for a Graphixia theme, I have to admit that I had forgotten how unwieldy a tome the series was – I had first read it over the course of two decades as each individual issue came out and become an immediate fan, following the series in great detail and even commissioning a sketch of Cerebus from Sim himself (I don't have much reason or opportunity to show it off, so I've included it to the right) . Spanning three hundred issues over the course of nearly thirty years, Cerebus is comics’ longest running maxi-series and has inspired a legion of fans from across the globe; there are many fan websites devoted to the character, a secondary series exploring nuances and themes in the comic titled “Following Cerebus,” as well as a Cerebus wiki in which users contribute analysis of the many (often ambiguous) themes that parallel the central narrative. The series is also comics’ longest running and most successful independent title, having been produced in-house at Sim’s own Aardvark Vanaheim publishing company. The series began in 1977 as a straightforward parody of Conan the Barbarian in which the protagonist was replaced by a diminutive (but deadly) talking aardvark, but Cerebus quickly became the outlet for many of Sims’ lofty and often highly contentious ideas. There is also arguably no other series in popular comics that is so self-consciously literary, to the degree that by the midpoint of the series, in what has now been collected in the graphic novel “Reads,” Sim forewent regular comic panels altogether and replaced them with full pages of tiny-font text in which he took on the alias Viktor Davis to espouse his philosophies on gender. Cerebus has been wildly experimental in terms of content, style and form over its lengthy run, and many of comics’ more mainstream creators and artists, such as Todd McFarlane, point to Sim’s epic as being an inspiration for their own processes. It will undoubtedly be under continued study for decades to come, underappreciated in its time as many of the great literary works tend to be. It would be impossible to offer a summation of the series in a single posting (as I’ve vainly tried to do with much, much shorter runs on Graphixia), and any attempt at doing so would likely come off as unapproachable as someone attempting to get a friend on board with the intricacies of “Lost” near the end of its run. Cerebus is many things over the course of the eponymous title: an aardvark, an hermaphrodite, a Prime Minister, a Pope, a living voice of God (or Tarim) on Earth, a simple mendicant who finds himself in impossible situations, a barbarian, a jealous lover, a self-aware yet still fictional construct, and so on. We watch him progress throughout his life with bemusement as he falls prey equally to slapstick comedy as well as the machinations of politics, thoughtful reveries, existential crises and religious epiphanies. The story of Cerebus, as intricately woven as it is, however, is interspersed with Sim’s own philosophies that ultimately supplant the narrative. After weaving a highly complex story of Cerebus’ quest to meet with God, finding that each civilization (and there have been many before his own) have attempted the same goal, Cerebus finds himself encountering Sim himself. This volume, Minds, which will be the focus of my post, arguably marks the end of the Cerebus story, with the title afterwards becoming almost entirely a vehicle for Sim’s exploration of the then-current changes in his personal life (most notably in his religious studies of the Torah), delving into literature (through parodic characters in F. Stop Fitzgerald and Ham Ernestway) and sociological commentary in the form of open attacks on what he believes to be the rise of Marxist-Feminism and the subsequent downfall of modern society. “Minds” is a turning point for Cerebus both as a character and as a series, because it is in this chapter that Cerebus literally meets his maker, as Sim injects himself into the story, breaking the fourth wall in such an elaborate way as comics, and perhaps even literature in general, has never seen before. At this point in the overall narrative, Cerebus is attempting to rival one of the other Aardvarks, Cirin, to meet with his creator and find out, most importantly, whether or not the divine Creator is male or female (some have argued that this correlates directly with misogynic statements that run throughout the title). Flying through space on a throne (see what I mean about tough to explain?), Cerebus begins to hear a voice in his head that identifies itself as “Dave.” As the dialogue between the two progresses in Cerebus’ thought balloons, Sim clears up some minor mysteries for his readers by openly resolving some dangling narrative threads: Cerebus was stabbed in the uterus when he was a child so he can’t bear children, he misplaced some important idols in his past which was the reason that he never attained the level of conquest he dreamed of in the series’ early issues. Sim explains to a bewildered Cerebus that he is his creator, in essence the God that the protagonist has been looking for, and Cerebus attempts to rationalize being a character in a densely wrought universe that exists on an entirely different plane from that of Sim himself. Interestingly, when juxtaposed with the earlier volumes of the Cerebus storyline, this is really what all civilizations make an attempt at – reaching a transcendental plane in which we can see beyond the narratives of our own lives. Sim, however, implies that Cerebus’ actual actions in the story are not entirely in Dave’s own hands. In direct dialogue with his creation, he explains to Cerebus that “I introduce a situation into your life, you react to it. I neither approve or disapprove of your reaction, I don’t punish or reward you. I note your reaction and provide the consequences – in the form of the next situation. Your reaction implies the next situation … and so on” (133). In a sense, Sim is explaining what characterization in a long running serial truly is: Cerebus, because of his detailed history as a character, is expected to behave in particular ways. He is no longer under his creators’ control and, in a sense, has transcended fiction because of this. This is not to say that Cerebus is a predictable character – far from it – but it’s that even any unpredictability becomes part of his character itself. Sim is left with little more recourse than providing the next element of the story to which his creation, now in a sense under his own control, must react. He extends this idea further as Cerebus asks him to make his long-lost love, Jaka, fall for him again for the duration of the three hundred issue storyline. Sim shows Cerebus the ultimate folly of this through narrating and visualizing what the story would be like: Sim could create the situation of a loving relationship, but Cerebus would, in the end, remain Cerebus despite Dave’s best efforts to the contrary. Run to its conclusion, Cerebus would remain aggressive, abusive and unsatisfied with her because that is the nature of his established character. Though it may seem paradoxical that a creator cannot reshape his creation, Sim shows us that this is truly the case; in a way, because of readers’ expectations and because of the nature of character development, Cerebus’ actions are mandated by a reality that exists beyond Sim’s control. Frustrated with explaining himself to his creation and what he has become, Sim beats Cerebus and explains how much his actions have hurt others. Sim also interestingly explains how Cerebus’ actions have hurt him over the many years he has spent writing him – Sim has suffered himself, having had to make other characters suffer because of how Cerebus’ character has naturally evolved. As a result, Sim openly provides the next “situation” for Cerebus, giving him a stye that must be lanced, a very traumatic surgical process that he explains to his character (and readers) that he went through himself as a youth. Sim explains the “injury to eye” motif and how it arose in early 1950’s pulp, then proceeds to take a scalpel to his creation’s eye, hauntingly stating “let me show you what you have done unto others … let me show you all at once” (243). As a storyteller, then, Sim is left with at least some power – though he can’t compel his character to act in a particular way, he can in fact make him suffer through tragic and fearful situations. After making Cerebus endure the surgery, Sim seems at a loss as to what to do with him. He tells his creation that his life and situational contexts, from at least this point in the narrative forward, are his own: “you are the baker, and your life is the bread” (127), offering Cerebus a choice as to where the narrative will go next. Given the unlimited possibility of any situational context in which to act out his final hundred issues, Cerebus ultimately decides on none – he merely wants his creator to go away. Sim, surprised at this, actually draws himself into the story; hunched over his desk, he suppresses a laugh, and wishes Cerebus a happy epilogue. Cerebus does, however, finally decide to return to a narrative life, refusing to be stranded out of his creators’ eye on the distant planet on which Sim has deposited him. Cerebus makes a phone call in his own head to the offices of Aardvark Vanaheim, begging “Dave” to pay attention to him again and take him back. He finally decides that he’d like to spend his final days at an inn, playing sports and drinking the remainder of his life away with his friends, a decision that prompts the next arc in the series, “Guys.” At the last, the reader is left with the sense that, perhaps, Sim has finished the telling of the surface Cerebus story of fantasy and political intrigue. The ostensibly benevolent act of giving his creation complete control over his own situational context, as previously mentioned, descends over the next hundred issues into a personal journey of Sim’s own interests and bugbears in modern life, with Cerebus as both character and narrative taking a backseat to this fundamental focus. This is not to say that the remainder of the text is not worthy of study – far from it – but Sim seems content that his creation has come to his ultimate fruition, existing in a reality that ironically surpasses Sim’s own. I’m reminded of Grant Morrison’s own reflection regarding his run on Animal Man in the early 1990’s here, in that he acknowledged that the character will long outlive him and, in doing so, is in a sense more real than he as the author could ever hope to be. With “Minds,” as elsewhere in Cerebus, Sim explores what it means to be an artist and the creator of an intricate universe coupled with the complex nature of free will – as rich and dense a history as he concocts throughout the first two hundred issues of his story, he ultimately acquiesces to the power that his creation has over him. One could argue that he loses himself in the task and, faced with being superseded by his creation, falls prey to his own interests that become the brunt of the story in the final third of the series while openly and regularly publishing opinionated essays in the endnotes of the individual issues. This said, “Minds” is an ideal and fascinating examination of the necessary duality inherent in the creative process, showcasing the mindset of a creator who has had complete control over his comic character longer than any other writer in comics’ history. Though even the surface story of Cerebus is one of comics’ most intricate and self-consciously philosophical sagas, punctuated with slapstick and running the gamut of the disciplines in its varying themes, it is also an intensely wrought exploration of the artistic process on the whole. Work Cited Sim, Dave and Gerhard. Minds. Windsor: Aardvark Vanaheim, 1996.

#63 Visible and Hidden Trauma in Natsume Ono's Not Simple

wilkinsp — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 13:00:12 +0000

“It’s about this really unlucky guy who finally hits rock bottom and ends up getting killed in a case of mistaken identity...And here’s the thing. The man writing the story is gay, and he hangs around this other guy and just observes him” (41). A typical representation of trauma in narrative is where one character reports on another’s horrific or mysterious death. Psychological trauma thus becomes identified with concepts like loss, mourning and memory that demand analysis and interpretation of the relationship’s meaning, as if a relationship can only be properly understood after it has been traumatised. Furthermore, the dead other transforms into something like a saintly cipher. Who was that person? What did he or she mean? Through asking such questions, the character who lives on comes to understand something about him or herself. Natsume Ono’s manga Not Simple presents such a relationship between two characters, Jim and Ian, where Jim is in a position to interpret Ian’s trauma. Jim writes a novel about the traumatic life of his friend and then disappears. While Not Simple has an omniscient point of view, the relationship it creates between Jim and Ian recalls novels like Moby-Dick and The Great Gatsby in which the narrator acts as a lens through which we see the main character’s story, as if perceiving that story directly would be like staring at the sun. But the relationship between the teller and the told-about creates a feedback that makes us think about what the story means to the teller. In Moby-Dick, Ahab remains after the wreck of the Pequod, the only survivor to report on events. In Not Simple, Jim would appear to be in Ishmael’s position, but ultimately he is not the “voice” of this manga, tempting as it may be to put him in that role. Rather, he is the enigma of the narrative: the mysterious counterpart to the all-too-clear story of his friend. Jim’s interest in Ian starts when he interviews him for a Melbourne newspaper. Ian is a competitive runner who creates curiosity when he extravagantly celebrates finishing fourth in a race. In the course of this interview, Ian reveals things about himself that Jim can’t use for the paper, but preserves for an idea for a novel. From then on the two are linked. When Ian discovers that his lost sister is in America, he accompanies Jim, who has a new job in New York. Ian drifts away from Jim in his search for his sister, but always returns to haunt him. At first read of Not Simple, Ian, with his horrible life, is the dominant character; the story is structured around his search for his sister across the United States. Ian’s story is so complex that it would take two pages to account for its twists. Here are the key points:

He is child of an incestuous relationship between his father and his sister.
His father’s wife is an alcoholic who lets a pimp shop Ian as a child prostitute.
His “sister” goes to prison for a botched bank job and takes up with Ian’s old pimp (though neither knows about this prior relationship).
He is infected with HIV
He is murdered by the henchman of an angry father, when a girl poses him as her boyfriend

Ian’s story depicts the worst possible life one could imagine. Consequently, we might dismiss it as implausible, overly melodramatic, or perhaps only distasteful to bourgeois taste (because we know many people live such lives of disaster and ruin). Ian’s narrative is what Greek tragedy looks like when the characters aren’t kings and queens. And with its incest plot and uncanny revelations, Not Simple is something of an Oedipus story. “Not simple” refers not only to the plot but also to Ian himself. He initially appears to be somewhat simple-- “a person unclouded by too much thought” as Jim puts it (181)-- in the way he accepts the things that happen to him without much reaction. For example when he tells the story of his experience as a child prostitute, he does so without any affect or moral indignation, as if he doesn’t know that it is strange or wrong. And Ian persists in his belief in the integrity of families, no matter how terrible or ‘not simple’ they are. This lack of reaction, as a form of understatement, sparks our own horrified response. We expect Jim to respond as well. But he and his friend Rick just tell Ian not to talk about his prostitution experience with anyone else. Jim remains an observer even in the most traumatic moments. For example, the one time that Ian does shaken--when he returns from visiting his sister’s ex-boyfriend, who turns out to be the pimp who gave him gum in exchange for sex--Jim immediately puts on his jacket to go visit the pimp for information for his novel. Jim’s relationship to Ian is not quite prurient, but it has a dimension that makes us question his ethics. He seems to be using Ian as raw material for his novel, with a writer’s objective distance. But this indulgence in someone else’s trauma makes us see that Ian is a mirror for Jim, a way of coming to grips with his own problems. Whereas Ian’s story is all about shocking revelation, Jim’s is about quiet repression. Ian desperately seeks his family, but Jim carefully avoids his because of their reaction to his sexuality: “Here I am trying to avoid my family...but they keep finding me. Meanwhile, Ian’s still searching for his family...” (208). The image of Jim that stands out is him standing before the phone or a phone booth on the verge of making a call home. Ian’s traumatic life, coupled with his nonchalant response to it, exposes Jim’s inability to deal with his own family issues, the biggest of which is his father’s inability to accept his homosexuality. When Jim does make a call to his family, and his mother tells him that his father has rethought his position and that he can come home, we see that as the sticking point of the story. The plot of mistaken identity involving Ian, murdered by an angry father who believes he is his daughter’s boyfriend, appears as a displacement of Jim’s own fears of paternal retribution. No forgiveness from his family can relieve these fears--the manga repeats the image of characters whose faces have been bandaged after they have been struck by family members. By representing Jim in this way, Not Simple is not so much criticizing him as presenting his position as complex to balance Ian’s apparent simplicity. Jim’s response to Ian’s death is to narrativize it. He immediately starts thinking about writing his book, figuring out characters and names: “You’ll be in it too...Your name’ll be...Alicia” (34). So doing, he neatly packages up the traumatic experience and pushes it away from himself. Not Simple is not Jim’s novel; rather it is the graphic displacement of that narrative so that it re-frames the focus of interpretation and mystery. We know everything there is to know about Ian, in all its melodramatic horror. Jim, the writer/novelist, becomes the cipher. And with that twist, Natsume Ono turns Not Simple from a narrative that lays out a traumatic story for all to see to one that conceals its traumatic kernel and maintains its secrecy. Work Cited Ono, Natsume. Trans. Joe Yamazaki. Not Simple. San Francisco: Viz Media 2010.

#65 When Life Gives You Lemons, Destroy Everything Your Parents Hold Dear: Trauma and Naming in Marvel's Runaways

Grayb — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 12:00:22 +0000

So I really like young adult fiction, and I really like comics. And sometimes, a series pops up that allows me to blend my love of both. Marvel's Runaways series, initially by Brian K. Vaughn but later taken over by Joss Whedon and then something of a rotating cast of folks, deals with a group of young people who are forced to hang out together because their parents are friends. Except their parents aren't friends. Their parents are a group of supervillains called The Pride, and the teenagers find this out when they witness their parents sacrificing a young girl. While this would drive a non-Marvel group of teens into therapy, the Runaways, as they come to be known, decide to be good to their parents' evil and right the wrongs in their family legacies. The series started in 2005, though I kind of lost interest when Whedon left the series at issue #30, so this post focuses on issues 1-30. Runaways has been on hiatus for some time, but there's a movie slated for 2014 -- so I'm either behind schedule or ahead of schedule in writing this, I suppose. When we set the theme for this month at Graphixia as trauma, I knew I would talk about Runaways. The series operates on the premise that trauma can be overcome with good deeds, and that one's traumatic past is not necessarily one's destiny. The tagline for the series is, "At some point in their lives, all young people believe their parents are evil... but what if they really are?" -- the protagonists are torn between running from the legacy of their past traumas and facing the reality of where they come from head on, especially when they discover their own mutant powers and their status as outlaws in the mutant world (particularly with the series dovetailing with the Civil War storyline). In the first issue, a number of different ways of coping with trauma emerge as the characters decide what to do about their names. Many of the characters opt to completely distance themselves from their parents. Nico rebrands herself as Sister Grimm, and Karolina becomes Lucy in the Sky upon the discovery of her ability to fly. Others exemplify the tension between the lives their parents led and their own, like Gertrude who renames herself Arsenic and wants to eschew all knowledge of her parents, but is accompanied by the dinosaur her parents genetically engineered to protect her. And finally, some develop a truly complicated sense of self in the wake of trauma: Alex Wilder opts to retain his name, asserting, "I recognize that my parents have ruined that name, but I don't want to run from it. I want to redeem it." While the characters allow Alex the space to feel this way, in the narrative the decision not to rename himself comes to represent his loyalty to his parents in spite of their evil; when the Runaways are finally able to destroy the Pride and a resurrected version of Alex's father, he is unable to act and dies in the process. In the world of Runaways, renaming is an essential part of truly reframing one's life in the wake of trauma. Interestingly, however, the renamings don't last. What is important is not the new identity that the names represent, but the name as a symbolic choice to distance oneself from the trauma imposed by the parents. The choice not to rename brands Alex as separate and apart from his friends, unable to develop his own identity distinct from his parents and eventually leading to his betrayal of his friends and ultimate death. But as the Runaways destroy the Pride, the need for separate selves seems to dissipate and the characters return to their original names. The characters' growth no longer needs to be symbolized by names as it has begun to be exemplified by actions as the Runaways dismantle the legacy of the Pride. Instead, they are able to make sense of themselves as whole people, distinct from the choices made by their parents but products of a difficult, traumatic history. Works Cited: Vaughn, Brian K. Pride & Joy. New York: Marvel, 2005.

#64 The Trauma of Obsolescence

admin — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 05:04:58 +0000

Created to function as a commodity, something to be purchased, read, and thrown away, quickly replaced by the next issue, comics have always had an inferiority complex. Though the medium has gained traction in elite intellectual circles and expanded its story arcs beyond black and white moral tales, it clings to its underdog status. It does so because without the impending trauma that comes with obsolescence, comics would cease being innovative. As a subject for interpretation in the comics medium, trauma is a foundational theme. Superman’s arrival on earth from a dead world, Batman’s ascension from the psychological cave created as he bore witness to his parent’s death, Jimmy Corrigan’s ongoing disassociation from anything resembling a father, Valdek’s stationary cycling through memories of the Holocaust, all serve to prime readers for the character’s battle with traumatic events. Trauma is so frequent in comic narratives it is almost overwrought. It’s presence a requirement for any story within the medium. Even Archie and Jughead dance with the trauma common to all, of being in high school, relationships, sexual innuendo. Trauma is the necessary fissure in any storyline that moves the characters to action—the classic example of course being Rorschach whose psychological trauma pulsates in his mask, his social outlook, and his behavior toward the criminal element.

Not only is trauma present, it’s worked over. One of the essential elements of the genre’s narrative form is to constantly revisit the traumatic moment, both to remind readers and rev the engine that will propel the character development into new regions. As Eco notes, superheroes are doomed to repeat their storylines lest they be “consumed,” just as “slice of life” comics are doomed to revisit the character’s past, the causes of her present predicament, or the impending crisis of some looming moment. Even seemingly innocuous comic treatments such as the graphic version of the 9/11 report themselves rely on the traumatic event itself to justify such visual retellings. Littered with failed relationships, murdered family members, suicide, dead fathers, dead worlds, parallel dimensions, military coups, last stands, comics are the medium for the traumatic. Of course, comics also work it through. Constantly on the verge of being rendered redundant by failing sales, flagging readership, and other media overwhelming their position, comics are a medium in the habit of responding to trauma. Their story arcs reflect this perseverance. In fact, it’s ingrained into the medium itself. The very presence of the traumatic consistently through all the varied narrative modes comics have to offer speaks to the central role coping with the traumatic plays in the medium. Comics, better than any other medium, responds to the threat of obsolescence by reinventing itself. An ironic twist in that its storylines, particularly in the case of superheroes, are repetitive; its non-superhero formats dominated by the personal memoire, which revisits and repeats a familiar narrative. What keeps comics innovative and adaptable to myriad onslaughts from other media is their experience with the traumatic. The medium and its storylines are built on the traumatic; its readers expect the traumatic. To put it baldly, comics never need to develop a set of rules in order to perpetuate the genre. Instead, they rely on a set of guidelines formed around experiences with the traumatic intersections of obsolesce and the new, futility and hopefulness, sickness and cure, fracturing our expectations for their resolution. Unlike Goofy on the dance floor in Firehouse Five + Two, comics expect to be unprepared for the traumatic event, or better, predict the traumatic event because the genre knows it’s coming; it has to, that’s how the medium works after all, and makes for the dance floor legs akimbo coping with the trauma of its own obsolescence as only it can—by representing trauma.

Works Cited

Eco, Umberto. "The Myth of Superman." Trans. Natalie Chilton. Diacritics 2.1 (1972): 14-22. Jacobson, Sid. The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation. New York: FSG Adult, 2006. Morrison, Grant and Frank Quitely. All Star Superman.. New York: DC Comics, 2011. Spiegelman, Art. Maus I & II Paperback Boxed Set. New York: Pantheon, 1993. Ware, Chris. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. London: Jonathan Cape, 2004.

#66 Trauma in Kirkman's "The Walking Dead": Finding our Humanity in an Unlikely Place

smarsden — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:41:31 +0000

“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.” – Charles Bukowski Robert Kirkman’s “The Walking Dead” is, at first glance, a tough sell for those readers not interested in the zombie / horror / post-apocalyptic genre of storytelling – many are affronted by the concept, recalling its gory predecessors with hollow plotlines that centred solely on survival and left little room for character development. Trying to push the text on others has been a challenge, and my attempts at defining the nuances of what makes the long running comics’ series so worthwhile are typically met with “but still, zombies aren’t my thing.” “The Walking Dead,” however, from its outset defied all genre expectations and has continued to do so for nearly a hundred issues and counting. It is a character-driven story that problematizes the experience of being human in ways that few texts are capable of accomplishing. At first, trauma in “The Walking Dead” may appear to be a no brainer (pun intended). We have characters who are subjected to the horror of reanimated corpses (who are often friends and loved ones), who are physically and emotionally distraught at every turn, who are left without the common social structures which we normally turn to for support in times of crisis. Left in an apparently godless world ruled by the dead who are roaming in search of living, human flesh to feed on, the broad strokes of the series seem to embody the entire horror genre that preceded it, accessing the most basic of human impulses of fight or flight. This, however, is only the surface trauma that the characters experience, and Kirkman is unfathomably deft in showcasing what psychological trauma actually is through the survivors of his zombie apocalypse. The trauma inherent in “The Walking Dead” comes not from the zombies themselves, but from the human characters as they learn to cope with one another (and themselves) in their raggedy band of survival – the title itself is here an interesting pun, as it’s the humans who are truly the walking dead, bereft of their personalities and their former social selves. These characters, facing nearly insurmountable and horrific challenges, have to reinvent themselves in Kirkman’s post-apocalyptic world in which the simple experience of being human carries very different connotations than it does in our own. Rick, the group’s leader, consistently struggles (at least early on in the series) with the greatness that has been thrust upon him; he has to rise up to the expectations of his group in ensuring their safety, all the while incapable of resisting the guilt that comes from so many having died under his protection, including his best friend (killed by his son who was protecting him) and his wife and newborn baby daughter. Similarly, Rick’s pregnant Lori had to toil with the decision of bringing a life into a world in which there was little to no hope for even her survival – which was ultimately a losing battle. “The Walking Dead” tests its characters with the intensity of social roles in a new, concentrated dynamic, challenging what it means to be a leader, to be a mother, in the stress of the most extreme situations imaginable. Though the story sees its characters faced with the expected challenges of the zombie genre, it’s in their human struggles that we see them in the most pain – Rick experiences far more loss when facing down the barrel of a gun held by Shane, his best friend and whom he has discovered has been sleeping with his wife during his absence, than he does on being attacked by endless hordes of the undead. Likewise, Michonne is most traumatized not by zombies, but by her vicious rape at the hands of the Governor. The most brutal vignettes that Kirkman gives us throughout the series never actually involve zombies, but what we are capable of doing to each other when all of the chips are down (and they’re never more down than after a zombie apocalypse). The scenes during which we feel most for these characters are during their human encounters which have been heightened due to their impossible environment. When the social world of bills and taxes has been stripped away, the travails that these characters experience are amplified because they’re all in the process of rediscovering who they are, and redefining what it means to be human in the absence of the trivialities that consume our daily existences. “The Walking Dead” shows us the trauma of what real human life actually means when it’s been divorced of all of the mundane functions that we must attend to on a daily basis, begging the reader to similarly question what kind of person he or she is at the core – and ultimately be afraid of answering that question. The zombies act as a backdrop, little more than an irregularly occurring motif in the series that focuses intensely on character development and situational redevelopment. Despite all of the pain and loss, however, Kirkman ultimately offers us hope: the extremity of the environment also serves to heighten the emotional connection that the characters feel for one another. These characters, in the face of the same impending death that we all face (via zombies or otherwise), experience life, friendships and love in a way that only those fully aware of their own mortality are capable of. In recognizing that we are all the walking dead, we can experience what it really means to be alive. The trauma of true human existence, stripped of its facades, is punctuated in the series by equally profound moments of joy in the ability to see another day and to face it together. “The Walking Dead” offers us an entrypoint into an unfettered reality with realistic characters and an impossible situation, and it’s in this that Kirkman’s narrative transcends the typical zombie survival story: in facing immanent death, he reminds us, and often surprises us, with what it truly means to be human. Works Cited Bukowski, Charles. The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship. Ecco: New York, 2002. Kirkman, Robert. The Walking Dead. Berkeley: Image.

#67 In the Land of Marvelous Dreams: Neil Gaiman's Sandman

wilkinsp — Tue, 01 May 2012 02:49:00 +0000

In previous posts we have addressed the issues in comics of continuity, retconning, and the radical alternation of drawing and colouring styles to indicate different sorts of worlds. All of these issues illuminate the force that the history of comics exerts over creators. Chris Ware cannot separate his own work from the legacy of Superman in Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. Ed Brubaker engages with Archie in Fatale: Last of the Innocent. Every writer and artist who works on Superman, Batman, Spiderman or any of the other franchise books at DC and Marvel feels the weight of past incarnations of the characters on their shoulders. In issues 11 and 12 of The Sandman, Neil Gaiman engages with previous Sandman incarnations in order to assert his own power over the title, just as within the narrative Dream (or Morpheus) must assert his authority over the Dreaming, having been imprisoned for so long. While Gaiman's approach to his predecessors is playful, even mocking, he ultimately returns his power to the DC empire, like Prospero breaking his staff at the end of the Tempest. In issues 11 and 12 we meet the 1974 version of the Simon/Kirby Sandman, appropriately enough in the dream of Jed Walker. In that Sandman, the hero protects Jed from nightmares and the traumas of reality by controlling his dreams. In issue 11, the story of Rose Walker moving into a shared house in San Francisco is interrupted by a page that looks like it is from a different comic. A ribbon banner at the top of the page announces: "In the Land of Marvelous Dreams." On that page, the Sandman and a white-haired, pregnant woman take Jed by the hands and they fly, until "the skooky bird," a white bird released by two ugly figures in a hot air balloon, tickles Jed's hands and he falls. The page has a fantasy, fairytale quality. It looks like a page from a comic for children, in stark contrast to the horror story that surrounds it. The language of the page is stilted, largely due to the absence of contractions: "Do not let go of my hand, Jed. Or you will fall." "Oh no! It is the skooky bird." The phrasing sounds archaic and unnatural. So when we get to the transitional, final panel on the page, in which the dream Jed shifts to real Jed, we are shocked: "Shut up you little bastard! Or I'll really give you something to scream about!" Jed's uncle screams at him. Gaiman thus stresses the radical generic and stylistic alterity of his version of The Sandman relative to previous versions. The Sandman comics of the past appear innocent, removed from reality, and the stuff of nostalgia. The world of Gaiman's Sandman, however, is serious, dangerous, and psychologically traumatic. Gaiman thus co-opts the history of The Sandman to show us how far the medium has come, not only since 1942 when the first Kirby/Simon Sandman appeared, but since the 1970s and 1980s as well. Of course, we can locate Gaiman's Sandman within a period aesthetic of its own. Morpheus looks like a version of The Cure's Robert Smith, a period Goth. In "inheriting" The Sandman, Gaiman does not have to deal with the weighty past of a Superman or Batman. Simon and Kirby may have been great creators of comics, but The Sandman is a relative light-weight. After all, this is a superhero who helps Santa Claus in one issue. Indeed, the prior incarnation of The Sandman in Gaiman's verson appears hyberbolic and idiotic: "Say guys, do you think this nightmare monster is gonna be a tougher battle than the skeleton men from Pluto? Do you? Do you?" Norman Mailer called Gaiman's Sandman "a comic book for intellectuals;" but Gaiman obviously does not feel the same way about his predecessors. Nevertheless, Gaiman takes Simon and Kirby's second version of The Sandman, in which the title character monitors and regulates dreams, as raw material for his own work. He takes what is essentially a cheesy story and turns it into a masterwork. For instance, we learn that Brute and Glob, the Sandman's nightmare assistants from the second Simon and Kirby go round of the title, have hijacked the dead Hector Hall and have turned him into a sort of Sandman placeholder as they try to gain control over The Dreaming while Morpheus has been held captive for 70 years. Morpheus has to put his world back in order, and part of that project is usurping the continuity of The Sandman of the past and asserting his own vision. However, Gaiman also returns the franchise to the DC universe when he is done with it. The white-haired pregnant woman in the "In the Land of Marvellous Dreams" page is Hyppolyta "Lyta" Trevor, daughter of Wonder Woman in one DC continuity and daughter of Fury in another. While Hector Hall is the biological father of the fetus Lyta carries, Morpheus is in a way his spiritual father, and Daniel Hall, Lyta's son becomes the new Dream when Morpheus dies. Thus Gaiman, having taken the Dreaming hostage for 75 issues and bending it all out of shape, politely gives it back. After a strange and wonderful deviation, normal programming resumes. Like Morpheus himself, Gaiman's run of The Sandman occupies a liminal space, between the generic constraints and conventions of mass market comics conventions and a complex literary imaginative space. When we read it, we lose track of the distinctions, entering a hypnagogic state. Works Cited Gaiman, Neil (writer), Mike Dringenberg and Malcolm Jones III (artists). "Moving In." The Sandman: The Doll's House Part Two #11 New York: Vertigo, 1997. Gaiman, Neil (writer), Chris Bachalo (pencils), and Malcolm Jones (inks). "Playing House." The Sandman: The Doll's House Part Three #12 New York: Vertigo, 1997

#68 Of Skulls and Authorship

admin — Tue, 08 May 2012 05:39:53 +0000

The image of Dream emerging from his confinement through a vortex in which clouds give way to what look like stylized skulls in Episode I of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series is one that reminds us of the difficulties comic book practioners have when confronting the established traditions of the genre.

The "Hill of Skulls" metaphor is one that runs deep in comics. [Turns out it runs deep in a lot of things: check this out. Eds.] It certainly represents the standard metaphors of death, power, and enslavement within the stories in which it appears. However, the metaphor seems especially powerful in comics as a representation of the creative act or, more appropriately, the fears associated with the introduction of the new. As heavily populated with intertextuality as comics are, they are also an emerging medium with space for inventive story-lines and characters. The difficulty for practioners is how to tell the new story without offending the sensibilities of the genre. For such a young medium, comics carry an incredible weight in terms of the genre's history, expectations, and formal requirements. Every artist draws on a palimpsest of bodies and skulls--historical, literary, and artistic--no matter the subject / story.

Just as Hamlet searches for answers to an ambiguous world in his conversations with Yorick's skull, the Jester who he "once knew," comic book authors seem to address their forbears. It's not a consistently straight-up allusion, but a weighted one that carries with it the pressures of being the antecedent. On the one hand, the skull provides guidance and council, asserting themes, tropes, and formal expectation and on the other hand, the skull (a jester's after all; shadows of the Yellow Kid) mocks the artist for his derivative approach (as a comic book fan might). Appearing in The Doll’s House section of Gaiman’s Sandman series, The Corinthian is an apt example of the wrestling comic book artists seem to do with the conventions—loose though they may be—of the genre. The Corinthian’s speech to the Cereal Convention in “The Collectors” is reminiscent of a manifesto on the art of comics, or at the very least, its paradigms for expression—the speech is a metaphor here remember, so don’t let all this talk of killing fool you; comic book artists are all "entrepreneurs in an expanding field."

The Corinthian's taste for the "eyes of young boys" further points the alert reader in the direction of metaphors for artistic creativity in the comic book. Comic books are traditionally--and perhaps always will be--hungry for the eyes of young boys. Even a rudimentary scan of comics' history will reveal the situations upon which the merits of horror / murder / sexual plot-lines were weighed and outlawed for fear of corrupting the eyes of young boys. With that in mind, Dream's declarations about his intentions for The Corinthian reflect a nervousness with the creative act; an uncertainty about the merits of the creation itself in the face of its purpose. All of which is the classic dialogue between the creator and the creation.

The duality of both being blind and yet seeing clearly is another aspect of The Corinthian that deserves attention given its clear allusion to the role of reader. The willing suspension of disbelief is a universal component of becoming immersed in the kind of story Gaiman is putting forward in Sandman. The parallels between the "dream state" and the "state of reading" are drawn clearly in the tropes of the series, particularly as it continues to unfold. Here, as we read through the dual representation of the anxiety of authorship and the vile actions of a murderer, we are both seeing and suspending--seeing some things clearly while choosing not to see others at all--because the act of interpreting both the storyline and its metaphoric layers requires that we reject one in the service of understanding the other.

In The Doll's House episode, The Corinthian is represented within a fairly transparent metaphor for the cereal (vis: comic book) convention, as an all-star:

At the same time, the anxiety of authorship emerges as, despite his all-star status, The Corinthian's credentials are required and must be prominently displayed. The Corinthian--or the metaphor for authorship--is both anonymous and infamous; both friend and potential foe; he is both seen and unseen. At a convention where a large man with a mustache asks, "The Devil? Uh, would that be the Kentucky Devil, or the Oregon Devil? I got both here" (Gaiman 14.4) and one conventioneer exclaims, "The TV version? The TV version butchered it! But I hear you can get it uncut on video in Canada" (Gaiman 14.4), we find the anxiety of the comic book author on full display as The Corinthian in a room full of authorities of the genre. Moreover, there is a deep allusion to the dreamworld itself, which is both "seen" in the sleeping mind, bit "unseen" in the conventions of waking daylight.

As the above suggests however, The Dream seems to assert that a new age is upon us. Another symbolic allusion associated with the comic book genre, that of collecting or, historicization, is itself rejected. In a transformative moment, the true author of dreams emerges to vanquish the impostor (or, perhaps, the traditionalist looking for easy re-imaginings)--exchanging the comfort of daydreams for realities. The Dream's final words on his creation are, "The next time I make you, you shall not be so flawed and petty, little dream" (Gaiman 14.36). Itself a caveat for a renewed creative / aesthetic paradigm, the soliloquy ties together the numerous symbolic lines let out throughout the course of the narrative. Perhaps an assertion to probe deeper levels of story-telling in the medium, a call to reject conventions in favour of renewal, the end of The Corinthian signals the beginning of something new.

When The Corinthian is "uncreated," the metaphoric skull re-appears and with it all the allusions--literal, historical, generic--that suggest tensions between the new and the traditional. Gaiman's Sandman then becomes a commentary on the nature of the creative act as it applies to comic books, with its own generic conventions that are hard to break and its iconographic metaphors that are fluid and individual. The final reading suggests that making comics is about "uncreating" rather than creating, a way out of established conventions and into that liminal somnambulance (please, if you're a student, do not use the previous phrase, ever) that allows connections to be drawn without the logic or anxiety associated with their connection. The artistic voice awakens to drown.

Works Cited:

Gaiman, Neil (writer), Mike Dringenberg and Malcolm Jones III (artists). “The Collectors.” The Sandman: The Doll’s House Part Five #14 New York: Vertigo, 1997. Gaiman, Neil (writer), Sam Keith and Mike Dringenberg (artists). "Sleep of the Just" The Sandman #1. New York: Vertigo, 1989.

#69 Back to the Future: September 11 in Neil Gaiman's Marvel 1602

Grayb — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:40:45 +0000

Continuing Neil Gaiman month here at Graphixia, I'm pretty excited to talk about Marvel 1602, an eight-issue series penned by Gaiman and published in 2003. It won both a 2005 Quill Award and 2003's Worst Comic of the Year rating from Time Magazine, so it's a controversial title and certainly not one that appeals to everyone. But I really enjoyed it, particularly as someone who likes to talk about September 11 and its cultural impact -- because 9/11 is all over this book. In the Afterword to the trade paper edition of 1602, Gaiman discusses how after September 11, he didn't want to write a traditional Marvel storyline with explosions and death and war. He wanted to do something different -- but still needed the conflict and tension that war stories provide for comics. So he went back in time to 1602, setting the Marvel characters in an England under Queen Elizabeth, now aged and dying. Elizabeth doesn't love the mutants -- she doesn't know quite what to make of them, and she's concerned by their powers -- but as British subjects, she seeks to protect and tolerate them, even as the Spanish Inquisition hunt them as witchborn. But James is coming to power, and he hates himself some witchborn, so the mutants are undercover and on the run. (I find this choice really interesting, given that the opposite was basically true for Catholics at the time and instead of having the mutants at odds with the Pope, Gaiman could have had the mutant experience acting as analogous to non-Protestant experience in England; instead, the rising power of Catholics in England is absolutely the worst thing that could happen to the mutants.) Just as Marvel's Civil War was all about anxiety around power and authority in the post-9/11 era, either with us or against us era, 1602 is ultimately a comic informed by immediate post-9/11 anxieties and fears. The thrust of the comic centres around being able to change history -- to go back and fix a wrong that has been committed. It's also about America as the space of freedom: the mutants eventually must flee to Roanoake to find a space where they can escape the tyranny of King James (America, we are unsubtly told, has no need for the machinations of kings and queens). And finally, its about wishing and hoping for someone to intervene in the tragedies of the present, in the form of Marvel's Watchers. The Watchers are here, in this series, and what makes them interesting in 1602 is their willingness to betray their own policy of non-interference. The Watchers exist in the Marvel universe but typically they do not meddle. Here, in this post-9/11 historical space, they do meddle. They repair the Earth so it may continue. That the Watchers lift a hand here is typical of post-9/11 art that seeks to show a hand out there, somewhere, that can and will intervene on our behalf and protect us from trauma. The Watchers are ambivalent about their choice to act, but they do it -- and the sense of resolve in the series and its happy ending suggest this was the right choice. Marvel 1602 is an interesting read; the art is beautiful, and as with all alternate histories, if you've put your time in as a Marvel fan there are a lot of in-jokes for you. It feels too easy, the resolution -- too quick and too straightforward -- but as a product of its temporal moment, that makes sense. Also, one time it was on Jeopardy: Gaiman, Neil. Marvel 1602. Marvel, 2005.

#70 Marketing Storytelling: Neil Gaiman Selling his "Sandman"

smarsden — Tue, 22 May 2012 21:14:37 +0000

Neil Gaiman is one of those rare triple-threats of the publishing industry – he is an accomplished New York Times bestselling novelist, a successful author of children’s books as well as one of the most lauded comics writers in the industry. Though his canon in this latter medium is rife with excellent recent material (the “Eternals,” for example, or the miniseries “1602” that Brenna discussed last week), it’s difficult to avoid his much celebrated Sandman series as the defining triumph of Gaiman’s career. Sandman speaks to us because of the universalities that it evokes through its central characters of the Endless: anthropomorphic constructs of the features that define us as a species. Gaiman uses Sandman as a vehicle for his lofty ideas, drawing equally on literary allusion, conventions of horror and fantasy as well as classical mythology in order to drive his storytelling, keeping the eponymous character often in the background to pursue interests that are peripheral to the concerns of the central narrative. The result is that, by the close of Sandman’s run, Gaiman offers his readers a fictional universe that is nearly beyond comparison in its depth, and his tone gives the work a feeling of timelessness – it is often easy to lose oneself in the high-minded abstractions that the Sandman evokes. However, these aspects of his work only take shape in his later volumes, as in his opening collection, “Preludes and Nocturnes,” we see a very different Gaiman than the confident visionary that he is often described as. Prior to Sandman, Gaiman had only written one other mainstream comic book: “Black Orchid,” a prestige format, three-issue miniseries, which he wrote with his then-recent collaborator Dave McKean (who would later paint all of the covers for Sandman’s seventy-five issue run). British-born Gaiman has admitted, however, that he was apprehensive about beginning a career in writing US comics, unsure of his ability to write superheroes or even work within North American culture in crafting his narratives; as he notes in an interview, he was part of a “generation in the UK who’d grown up reading DC comics from a bizarre perspective. In America, those comics were perceived without irony; in England, they were like postcards from another world. The idea of a place that looked like New York, the idea of fire hydrants and pizzerias, was just as strange to us as the idea that anyone would wear a cape and fly over them” (qtd in Bender 21). It is largely because of this that Gaiman elected to work with the least known of DC’s cast of characters, concentrating more on his focus of fantasy and mythology by requesting the Phantom Stranger and the Demon. Thankfully for us, even these characters were reserved for more well-known authors, and Gaiman was rejected and left with reinventing a little-known character from the Golden Age for his first attempt at a monthly book. These first issues of the Sandman, for a reader familiar with the DC universe, show great trepidation in entering such a large universe with demanding expectations. Though he has mentioned in later interviews that he enjoyed working with Sandman so much because it “freed [him] from the baggage of DC continuity,” (qtd in Bender 24), the consistent (though subtle) references to both contemporary works and current events in the DCU show that Gaiman was quite concerned with positioning himself inside of this larger dynamic, often in a highly self-conscious way. Even the central premise of the story, Morpheus having been trapped by mortal magic for seven decades, stems from the desire to explain why so important a character has not been present in the DCU up until the point that Gaiman constructs him – Gaiman effectively writes Sandman into continuity ostensibly by writing him out of it, explaining away the absence of a significant character he intends to be a major player in future crossovers, a literary trick that his since been replicated by the likes of, among others, Brian Michael Bendis in his highly popular Marvel character the Sentry. Though we now think of Sandman as having kickstarted DC’s Vertigo imprint through a confident construction of an entirely new universe, Gaiman was actually catering to the conventions of the superhero comic and attempting to fabricate a place in it for both himself as well as his creation. This happens at several other points in Preludes and Nocturnes, notably in the guest role that John Constantine plays, a character that Gaiman borrowed from Alan Moore’s “Swamp Thing.” On breaking into an office to find Morpheus’ lost pouch of sand, Constantine encounters a run of texts in a drawer, one of which is titled “Crisis.” (90) This nod, lost to readers of the reprinted graphic novel, was a direct reference to the changing nature of the DCU at the time and the company's “Crisis on Infinite Earths.” The following issue, Gaiman incorporates Etrigan, a DC character who he’d been told in his early dealings with DC that he wasn’t allowed to write for because he didn’t have a large enough name in the industry at that point. His inclusion of the character, to one familiar with Gaiman’s history with DC, shows that the writer was bent on asserting himself as a strong voice within the American comics market very early on in his career. Moreover, in the later issues of Preludes and Nocturnes, Gaiman shoehorns in more mainstream DC characters in the then-recently revamped Justice League, making brief mention of the restructuring of the team due to the events spinning out of “Crisis.” Interestingly, Gaiman shows Martian Manhunter’s familiarity with the Sandman even though other DC characters do not know who he is – the Manhunter, one of the most powerful characters in the DCU with a long running history, drops to his knees in fealty to Gaiman’s creation (146). This is quite clearly Gaiman’s attempt at giving his Sandman some credibility in the DCU, highlighting the import of his characters only a few issues in to his new series even though, as readers, we’re just being introduced to them now. While the story of Sandman takes front and centre in these early issues, in the subtext and nuances one can see the workings of a fledgling artist attempting to establish himself in a marketplace that is quite cloistered and bent on nepotism – it is notoriously difficult to get a start in the comics publishing industry (particularly with the big two) without first knowing someone who has already achieved success. We can see elements of this nepotism at work in the early issues of Sandman as well. Gaiman’s partner, Dave McKean, had been assigned the role of artist for Grant Morrison’s “Arkham Asylum” hardcover graphic novel in order to build up a reputation for the release of Gaiman and McKean’s “Black Orchid” miniseries, released in tandem with the first few issues of the Sandman. McKean, as new to the American comics market as Gaiman, needed all the promotion that he could get, and Gaiman was happy to contribute to the cause – the final three issues of Preludes and Nocturnes feature Arkham as an important setting for the events of his story, as Doctor Destiny escapes from the madhouse and is eventually brought back there for punishment. The illustrations and text draw particular attention to the Asylum itself at multiple points in the narrative (209). Featuring Arkham in this way not only allowed Gaiman to support a friend and a fellow UK unknown, it also contributed to Gaiman’s own success as McKean had signed on to do all of Gaiman’s covers for Sandman: an attempt at cross pollination that proved to be very effective for both of them. Though the Sandman proved to be a very important and highly studied series over its seven-year run, in its beginnings, a reader who is familiar with the workings of the DCU at the time and the machinations (and sometimes ostracizing qualities) of the American publishing industry giants can see the underlying forceful attempts of a new author struggling to make a name for himself in a challenging new milieu. One could argue, as Gaiman sometimes hints at himself, that this entire first run had far less to do with crafting an interesting story than it did openly establishing Gaiman as a new voice in the comics market, a feat accomplished through narrative trickery and inclusion of references that incorporate his work into the larger universe of familiar characters and summer events. Though Gaiman is now considered a force unto himself in both universes offered by the big two publishers, a look at his less auspicious beginnings and early forays into the industry show that he is not only a talented writer but an adept marketer of his and his friends’ work, eager to make a name for himself in whichever artistic field he decides to participate in. Works Cited Bender, Hy. "The Sandman Companion." New York: Vertigo, 1999. Print. Gaiman, Neil. "The Sandman Volume One: Preludes and Nocturnes." New York: Vertigo, 1991. Print.

#71 Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys and Nostalgia

wilkinsp — Tue, 29 May 2012 13:00:03 +0000

Disclaimer: I am only part way through 20th Century Boys and my fragmentary comments on the series reflect this partial reading. Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys presents the fate of a group of young friends in 1969 who effectively write the future. From their secret base, they create a fantasy in which they rescue the world from evil threats like germ warfare, laser guns, and giant robots. When two bullies, Yanbo and Mabo, destroy the base towards the end of summer, Kenji, the group leader, decides that it is time to put fantasy aside and do homework in preparation for the upcoming school year. And that's the last of the fantasy, until the boys are adults, thoroughly enmeshed in reality, all hopes of heroic action dissipated. Kenji runs a liquor/convenience store, and is saddled with the care of his missing sister's daughter. Kenji's friends have similarly mundane occupations. A wedding of one of the boys is an early event. The groom, Keroyon, says, "Kenji, you guys are gettin' old now! You gotta get yourself settled down" (2.6) Thus, 20th Century Boys begins with the concept of subjectification, the point at which a person gives up on childish fantasies of power and significance and integrates with the grown-up world. In his speech at Keroyon's wedding, Kenji talks about this reduction in expectation: "Maybe now Keroyon-Kun can now protect the peace of his household or the neighborhood" now that the dream of protecting the world from evil has passed (2.15). But just at this point, the childhood fantasy re-asserts itself. Kenji spots a strangely familiar icon, the boy's symbol of friendship, as graffiti on a fence. One of the group, Donkey, dies suspiciously, having sent Kenji a note about the icon. And a mysterious figure named "Friend" has adopted the icon for his cult. Soon, utopian childhood fantasy becomes dystopian present that demands heroic action from Kenji and his friends. In this sense, Urusawa's plot has something of the superhero narrative about it, and the scenario plays upon the similar concerns about being an ordinary person with limited capability of acting in or upon the world whose problems seem insurmountable even when cities are not being terrorized by science fiction monsters. As a sort of internal allegory, A homeless man with a bowling obsession, nick-named "God," appears to have visionary power. His abilities in relation to his social situation represent an extreme version of Kenji's. That the story begins in 1969, the year of Woodstock is significant because the narrative uses rock and roll as a metaphor for meaning in the world. The title comes from the T-Rex song, and Kenji has had aspirations to rock stardom. When Kenji's sister buys him a guitar when he is a teenager, he looks at himself in the mirror and sees himself as a hero with a weapon: the electric guitar as phallus. The rock musician is a twentieth-century analogue of the mythical hero. The image of Kenji in the mirror as "invincible man" (18.13) gives way to the image of the man from the convenience store head office, who represents everything that unmans Kenji, telling him that he has to stop carrying around his sister's baby on his back because it is putting off customers. Kenji's failure in this realm is emblematic, perhaps, of his status as a warrior. He requires redemption. And yet this redemption demands a re-configuring of the masculine hero, the exchange of the phallic but ultimately ineffective guitar for the niece Kenji carries on his back and cares for is not an emasculating one. Rather, it is the link between Kenji's individual acceptance of responsibility for his world, a responsibility that the return of childhood fantasy as malevolent force magnifies. That the force the group must fight as adults is associated with friendship and that their enemy goes by the name of Friend gets at the root of what Urasawa is doing with the theme of nostalgia. The bond of friendship defines the childhood of these characters, and adulthood threatens that bond. Other bonds, like marriage, become more significant. Because "Friend" uses the icon that symbolized the childhood group, Kenji and the others believe that he must be one of them. An early suspect is Otcho, who has gone missing in India and Thailand, but Otcho turns up and works with Kenji. Otcho is interesting because he actually has a heroic persona; he gets Zen training in India and rescues prostitutes in Thailand. He earns the nickname "Shogun." But he is who he is because he has neglected marriage and fatherhood and has had to pay the price. Although Friend is ultimately identified as one of the boys, Fukubei, it is perhaps best to think of him as a psychological entity, the spectre of childhood friendship in adulthood, returning from the repressed to torment the boys with their failures. In keeping with the theme of repression, there's a lot of digging up of the buried past in the early going of 20th Century Boys: Kenji and his friends unearth a time capsule that they buried as children. Kenji ends up hiding underground with the homeless guys, earning the moniker "Kenji the underground emperor," which is itself a kind of backhanded way of pointing out his insignificance. The idea of 'being someone' drives the idea of nostalgia. We yearn for our youths because we were able to imagine ourselves as central figures in an engaging story, not just peripheral make-weights. Our yearning is not so much for the idyll but for the power that went with it. We had a secret base; our imaginary adventures were meaningful. We felt the ominous threats of the world in the form of bullies. Like Donkey, who runs especially fast when he takes off his shoes, we had special powers bestowed upon us by our imaginations. In adulthood, we cannot sustain those powers. We know too much about the mundane world we occupy to imagine ourselves rock stars, heroes, or even villains. Urasawa's vision is a stunning one. For he not only presents a "science fiction" narrative in images, but also provides a kind of analysis of why such a narrative is necessary from a historical, psychological perspective. Like all good science fiction, 20th Century Boys is less about escapism than it is about confronting our history by projecting it into the future, where we see what we might look like through the lens of what we imagined ourselves to be. Work Cited Urasawa, Naoki. 20th Century Boys. San Francisco: Viz Media, 2009.

#72 Seth and The Artifact / The Nostalgia

admin — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 05:58:39 +0000

[aesop_parallax img="http://www.graphixia.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/seth_wolf_01.jpg" parallaxbg="on" floater="off" floaterposition="center" floaterdirection="up" captionposition="top-left" lightbox="off"][aesop_image img="http://www.graphixia.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/seth_tophat.jpg" imgwidth="1200" caption="the image" align="center" captionposition="center" lightbox="off"]Canadian comic book practitioner Seth is well-known for his forays into false histories. His It's A Good Life If You Don't Weaken was so spot on in its representation of the author's search for a long lost New Yorker cartoonist that it fooled a lot of people into believing it was a true story. What makes Seth's representations of such false histories so authentic is his ability to render the nostalgic, or the emotional connection to a lost idealized moment. What's interesting about this creative practice is that Seth's "idealized moment" is itself fictional; the moment isn't actually lost, because it never was.

Among his many fine skills mentioned above, Seth also works to construct physical manifestations of the fictional world he creates. These object sketches, I suspect, themselves lend an air of authenticity for the author and help one imagine the actual physical space occupied by the fictional "Dominion City," which frequently stands as the story's backdrop. Seth's penchant for building physical objects, sometimes trophies and bits of clothing to accompany the buildings, points us toward a key facet for his evolving representation of idealized moments that, taken together, help to create a sense of nostalgia in the reader. Beginning with Clyde Fans (serialized in the Palookaville series) and continuing into the recently published The G. N. B. Double C, Seth relies on a narrative structure in which the speaker / narrator of the story walks about describing different objects and their relevance. In Seth's work, the comic becomes a space for displaying different artifacts with the narrator supplying the necessary context. The comic becomes a museum for an idealized past (which never existed). As we move through the narrative, we learn the fate and/or history of the objects the narrator encounters. These objects take on emotional resonance in Seth's work for two primary reasons: their scarcity and their importance to understanding the larger narrative. In essence, the objects are important because they mean something to the narrator, but they also mean something to the reader because there is a discovery awaiting--one in which the narrator or narrative is privileged to know (just like in a detective narrative). Perhaps the most important aspect of the objects in Seth's stories is their state of decay. It's a general statement, but the object's state of decay is also indicative of how idealized the narrator's version of the past has become. The narrator's reaction--usually emotional--to the object's state of decay calls up the resistance to the passing of time that usually accompanies the nostalgic exhibit of idealized moments. In Seth's work, the object is what allows the narrator to mine the emotional resonance that comes with loss and its nostalgic recovery. Nostalgia is then expressed not as a longing for an idealized past, but as a particular historical sequence, which is, as is the case with most memories viewed through the nostalgic lens, entirely fictional. All this suggests a powerful polemic at play in Seth's work. Comics collectors and practioners expend a great deal of energy accumulating and representing the cultural capital of comics without justification. Sure, the histrionics of Superman, or even the Holocaust as represented in other formats, are essential components of the medium's creative possibilities. However, the intensely personal perspectives that lie behind those historiographies--hence the common turn to memoir--suggest that the comic's past so often referenced, built upon, and expanded results from an essentially nostalgic viewpoint. Every comic is at its root a walk through the practioner's nostalgic encounters with the medium. For Seth, the power of comics is not in the objects--the comic books themselves--but in the narrators' description of them; in the stories they tell. Comics history, then, is a deeply personal one, often stained with the a nostalgia that attempts to assign value to that which was produced to be disposable. Work Cited Seth. The C.N.B. Double C. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2011. Print.

#73 Dispatches from Wales: The Beano, Nostalgia, and the Perpetuation of Comics Fans

Grayb — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 13:00:02 +0000

It's fitting that we're doing nostalgia month while I'm teaching a field school in Wales, because in a lot of ways this return to the UK, my first since I was about 15, has been all about nostalgia for me. And conveniently, that nostalgia is all wrapped up in comic books -- and sweets, and sugary drinks, and other trappings of childhood -- so here I am. This post is all about The Beano, a comic book published weekly since 1938 (with a brief break due to a shortage of supplies in WWII), having published 3500 issues as of 2009. The comic includes the regular adventures of characters like Dennis the Menace, Mini the Minx, the Bash Street Kids, Lord Snooty (since phased out), the Numbskulls, and Roger the Dodger. The individual strips are usually stand-alone comics, with the exception of some occasional through-lines. As a result, like any long-running series (Archie comes to mind), there is occasional repetition of storylines or ideas, but as generations move through comics (like Archie, the readership for The Beano is primarily children and young teenagers), this doesn't really matter. The Grand Comis Database has loads of issues logged here. The first thing I did when I got here, once the students were settled and I was over the jet lag, was find a newsagents where I could buy (a) The Beano and (b) candy. I have fond memories of my grandfather going out early in the mornings to retrieve both for me. The Beano looks a little different than I remember it -- it is glossy now, instead of the old stick-to-your-hands newsprint of yore, and the characters are a little slicker in the way contemporary Spider-Man looks slicker than 1960s Spider-Man, but the essence remains the same. So much the same, in fact, that I realized just how much you cannot go home again when it comes to comics: the gags I once found hilarious are no longer funny. I am, in fact, an adult. Boo. This realization got me thinking about the role nostalgia plays in keeping long-running comics series going. As children, do we stumble upon comics ourselves or through referral, being purchased issues by parents or older siblings who have vetted these series from their own experiences? And when we look back at the comics from our youth, do they hold up? Thinking back to our series on early Spider-Man, one would say no -- the naive idealism and cheeseball fights come to mind. And yet adult readers do find something in contemporary retellings of Spider-Man, which is a title that seems to have reinvented itself regularly to maintain relevancy. Even Archie has busily kept up with the times, making itself issue-oriented recently in order to grab both press and market share. The Beano, however, seems to have made a conscious choice to stay locked in a particular version of youth: fart jokes and puns, practical jokes from the 1950s, stay-at-home moms and strict tie-bedecked dads. There's a comic included in this issue from 1982, and it doesn't seem any different or removed from the comics in the rest of the issue. And that's not to say there's not a place for this particular brand of nostalgia; the series seems to hearken back to an England that doesn't exist anymore (if it ever really did). But it's an interesting choice for a comic to make in an era of contemporary appeal. And it means there's very little for an adult reader to connect to. This in and of itself is interesting. As a viewer or reader, I tend to privilege children's entertainment that operates on multiple levels, engaging with an adult audience alongside its child one. The Beano's choice to lock itself in time means it appeals to a child audience exclusively, which makes it effective as nostalgia but not as adult entertainment.

#74 Synaesthesia and Nostalgia: Comics as Ephemera

smarsden — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 20:23:08 +0000

As I anxiously await the birth of my first son (due in five days from the time of this writing), I can’t help but be immersed in a sense of nostalgia on a number of different levels – nostalgia for the bachelor life, for the freedom of mobility that comes with being unattached, for knowing that there is no one dependent on my actions or inactions save myself. This nostalgia, like all nostalgias, is infectious, and has also gotten me reflecting on my personal habits when it comes to comic collecting. My current collection stands at more than 20,000 issues, each of them bagged and boarded and housed in a monstrous custom-built library. In thinking about the collection as a whole, I find that I’m nostalgic not for the experience of reading them over the course of the years or for any particular storyline, but for what the collection represents in terms of the moments of acquisition that surround each particular issue. Flipping through long box after long box, as impossible as it seems I can remember the date of purchase of nearly every comic that I own. In each box is housed the memories of who I was at the moment I acquired these comics, and I carry the collection with me both cognitively and physically as I move through my life. Here at Graphixia we infrequently acknowledge the materiality of comics as objects, items that are often collected for the sake of being collected, and that are just as often purchased not to be read but to fill in a gap in a run of issues. Many of my own comics were acquired for this reason, both online and at conventions. Though I ostensibly buy my comics for the stories they contain and do value them for this reason, the larger collection is more important to me for the very different rationale of the order that it represents. Walter Benjamin is well aware of this aspect of collecting, and I’m often drawn to his “Unpacking my Library” when thinking of my own collecting habits. He writes: There is in the life of the collector a dialectical tension between the poles or order and disorder. Naturally, his existence is tied to… a relationship with objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value – that is their usefulness – but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate … Everything remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes the pedestal, the frame, the base, the lock of his property (60). Though Benjamin is writing about his books, the application is the same for the comic collector – these often simple superhero stories, diverse and unrealistic as they are, are intertwined with my own. One could argue that the same could hold true for all literature, that comics don’t hold a special place for the collector, but this isn’t exactly true – comics lend themselves to memory and nostalgia because they are visual, allowing for a more immersive experience in the fictional moment. These images, grafted in juxtaposition with those of daily life, allow me to be nostalgic for the story in the comic, the physical properties of it, as equally as I am for the moment in time during which I experienced them. For me, owning these comics is, in a way, taking ownership of these moments as well. As I reflect on my childhood (and, to be fair, my adulthood as well), I am immediately filled with all of the images of the comics I read as I am the places in which I grew up and the people who I met. Standing in front of my library, I’m standing in front of myself – in my mind’s eye I see the stark lines of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns as I, at eight years old in 1988, read the comic for the first time while waiting in the Surrey Public Library for my younger brother to finish his art class. Equally, I’m drawn back to the Time and Time Again Superman crossover arc, reading each weekly issue with a friend who, in junior high, skipped class every Wednesday to pick up the next installment. Even a few years ago, I’m sitting in my Aunt’s apartment, reading the final issue of Cerebus maxi-series, a comic I’d been waiting for for over a decade at that point. These and endless other characters, storylines, even particular panels surface in my memory, always juxtaposed with the moment during which I consumed them. The interplay of these forces and the synaesthetic quality of the experience makes comic collecting an important aspect of why I choose to hoard, alphabetize and maintain them and why I will continue to read and collect likely for the rest of my life – I feel a sense of pity that the next generation could be unaware of this facet of comics, as trades, digitals and webcomics replace the ephemera that are permanently bound to my most formative experiences. This post has been, perhaps, more nostalgic than it has been about nostalgia, but this kind of self involvement is what reading and collecting fiction of any kind – and particularly tales of the fantastic – is ultimately founded on. I know that when I pass the vast number of comics in my collection on to my son, years from now, I’ll be quietly giving him all of the moments that make up who I am, stamped on these lifeless things, captured unassumingly (and unknowably) in the stories that he will one day hopefully read. Work Cited Benjamin, Walter. "Unpacking my Library." Illuminations. New York; Schocken, 2007.

#75 Report on The Third International Conference on Comics: Comics Rock!

wilkinsp — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 03:36:25 +0000

The Third International Conference on Comics Conference: Comics Rock! took place over Thursday, June 28 and Friday, June 29, 2012 at Bournemouth University in England. Previous versions were held at Manchester Metropolitan University. Julia Round of Bournemouth University was the main organizer. Each day of the conference covered a different theme: Comics and Education for June 28 and Comics and Multimodal Adaptation for June 29. I will deal with each day in a separate post. What follows is a synopsis of the panels and events that I attended plus some added material from Damon Herd of the University of Dundee, who kindly offered notes on panels that he attended but I didn't. My intent is to present content rather than critique to give people who were unable to attend a sense of what the papers were about. If you attended the conference and/or presented one of the papers I discuss but have a different view than I present here, feel free to add a comment and we'll update the post. Julia set up a drinks and dinner meet-up on the Wednesday evening before the conference began. This event created a strong camaraderie among the participants. We ended up drinking ales and talking comics late into the night, which was a bit worrisome for me because I had to present in one of the first sessions the next morning. By the end of the evening everyone knew what everyone else was doing anyway, so it wasn't so bad.

Comics in College

[caption id="attachment_1781" align="aligncenter" width="189"] Paul Williams (left) chats with Paul Davies[/caption]

This was my session. I presented alongside Paul Davies of the University of Sussex and Charles Stephens from Texas A&M University. In “Comics Creation as Enrichment in an FE/Sixth Form College,” Paul talked about the usefulness of having students produce comics as part of their activity days, days for pursuing activities that are not conventionally academic. Paul used Scott McCloud's 24 Hour Comics Challenge to engage the students. While some students had trouble getting started and getting finished, the project was highly successful and produced several anthologies. Alas the project has finished.

[caption id="attachment_1782" align="aligncenter" width="256"] Charles Stephens and Christina Meyer[/caption]

In “Social (and Metaphysical) Justice: Hellblazer in the College Composition Classroom” Charles talked about the efficacy of using comics to allow students to talk about social justice issues as concrete representations and not just ideological positions. Furthermore, Hellblazer provided a useful bridge for ideological positions between Charles and some of his "conservative" students. In addition to reading and discussing Hellblazer, students had to produce a script for a six-panel comic that presented their position on a social justice issue. The constraint of the comic format produced more interesting work than conventional essays because it engaged the students as creative, reflective producers, quite the contrast to the uninvested work of the typical first-year composition class. Charles did a great job, considering his own constraint: he had lost his flash drive during a bag inspection at the Dallas airport.

I won't say much about my own paper, as I will discuss that elsewhere, but the topic was the relationship between comics and document use literacy: how we might use comics to teach people to negotiate the complex network of signs, tables, charts, and instructions that define our perceptual world. To put it briefly, such teaching would involve resisting discussing comics as if they were prose and engaging with their visual array instead.

Comics as Inspirational Teaching Tools (Notes from Damon Herd)

Nicola Streeten & Lisa El Refaie began their presentation, “Comics as a Tool for Transformative Meaning Making,” with a mime performance, each wearing a mask. The point was to show how the audience projected their own meaning onto the performance and create their own story. They quoted Micheal White and David Epston's Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends (WW Norton, 1990) “All stories have the potential to be transformative because they are full of gaps” and claimed that comics make the gaps more explicit and concrete. They compared Streeten’s Billy, Me & You with Willy Linthout’s Years of the Elephant to discuss dealing with bereavement without god or religion. Traumatic events, they asserted, invoke a search for a meta-narrative. In “The Iconography of Illness: Comics and Medical Education,” Ian Williams discussed visualizing disease as the 'other' and how medical practitioners have been using comics to present and discuss illness with patients. [I was disappointed that my session conflicted with Ian Williams' talk. I've read quite a bit about his project and was keen to hear him in person.--PW] Kym Tabulo, in “Developing Aesthetic Skills and Self-esteem: Using Conventional and Abstract Comics in Art,” discussed the use of abstract comics in classroom and the difference between them and abstract polyptychs in fine art. She talked about how her students created their own abstract comics, influenced by Andrei Molotiu’s Abstract Comics: The Anthology. Damon continued the discussion with Kym over lunch as she presented a quiz she does with students in which they have to guess which slides are comics and which are fine art. Interestingly she said there was a right answer.

Comics as Resources for Research and Life

[caption id="attachment_1783" align="alignleft" width="227"] Ian Hague (left) talks with Simon Grennan[/caption] Ian Hague of the University of Chichester detailed his ambitious plans for expanding The Comics Forum, his organization that runs an academic conference alongside Thought Bubble, an annual comics convention in Leeds. Ian outlined the resources that the Forum already had, such as the website, the scholar's directory, and the blog, and plans for future, the most exciting of which was perhaps the creation of a professional scholarly body for comics scholars. Heather Wilson of Glyndwr University presented a conference highlight in "Why Girls Need Comics and Comics Need Girls." Heather was not used to speaking before a large audience and had to pause at moments, but her material made everyone sit up and take notice. She demonstrated the typical array of magazines available for girls in the UK and the banality of the narratives they provide as models. Heather and her colleagues have been able to produce a tonic to such magazines with Clockwork Express, which presents more intellectual stories that don't conform to the gender-code straight jacket. She also talked about "She Inspired" a project that involved classroom visits to schools in which both girls and boys created comics about notable women in history. The boys were just as into the project as girls and showed no hesitation at getting involved with the subject matter. At the conclusion of her talk, there was a rush to purchase copies of Clockwork Express. I was in that rush because I have a 9 year old daughter who fits into the category Heather described as "the middle-aged kid": girls between 8 and 13.

Roundtable: The Place of Comics on English Degrees

Paul Williams (Exeter University), Chris Murray (University of Dundee), Matt Green (University of Nottingham), and Dean Chan (University of Wollongong) talked generally about what comics were being taught in degree programs and how they related to other literature. For example, in one introduction to the novel course at Exeter, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is taught as "the future of the novel." This struck me as odd because Fun Home is a memoir rather than a novel but still.... Chris Murray talked about setting up his degree program at Dundee as well as an available module in the undergraduate English program on "Contemporary British Writers of Comics and Graphic Novels." The most striking thing for me about this panel was that Dean Chan referred to the popularity of teaching Ann Marie Fleming's The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam in Asian-American literature courses in Australia. Ann Marie and I were in the English program at the University of British Columbia together, and it was uncanny to have travelled to Bournemouth from Canada to hear someone from Australia talk about the work of someone I used to know!

Teaching Literature

Di Laycock's (University of Sydney) paper, “Teacher Tales from the Graphic Novel Classroom” stood out the most for me among this group because her phenomenological case study of how Australian teachers were using and responding to graphic novels struck me as timely. We usually rely on anecdotal evidence for what works in the classroom without ever putting the information together in a comprehensive fashion. So, when Laycock reported that teachers had a highly positive experience with graphic novels in terms of their own pedagogy and student outcomes, it meant something because it was based on a wide-ranging study. Shari Sabeti (University of Stirling) and Mel Gibson's (Northumbria University) papers (“Comic Book Adaptations of Hamlet for the Education Environment” and “Macbeth: Adaptation, Teaching, and Fidelity” respectively) on adapting Shakespeare bridged the two themes of this year's conference, and could easily have fit into the next day's "Multimodal Adaptation" sessions, particularly Sabeti's, as she talked about how a contemporary student's relationship to Shakespeare was transmedial and multimodal: students read the play, watch the film adaptations, and look at images of the Globe Theatre. Sabeti had some interesting things to say about how comics artists used visual means to represent Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech. Gibson's talk focused on adaptations of Macbeth and how they tended to replicate a "historical" image of the play and did not attempt science fiction versions and the like. She argued that the banal imagery of comic book adaptations tended to counter the horrors of the play. These discussions of the adaptations of Shakespeare led me to think that such adaptations tend to be a millstone for the serious consideration of comics because they promote the idea that the comics are subordinate to "literature" in terms of content and complexity. As Gibson noted, reading the adaptation is often equated with "cheating." More mashups and remixes are required I think.

Teaching Socialization and Values (Notes from Damon Herd)

Kenan Kocak (Glasgow University) in “Comics in Education: Cin Ali from Turkey” discussed this series of 10 picture books, whose reading level increases with each book, used to teach reading to children in Turkey. Cin Ali translates as cunning Ali, although he appears to be well-behaved with no real evidence of cunning. Kocak noted there was nostalgic affection for these books although on close examination they could be seen as tools of the conservative State to encourage children to conform. Interestingly, the drawings are all stickmen/women--even the animals have stick bodies and limbs-- but the heads, feet and hands are all quite detailed. This odd combination makes one re-consider McCloud’s idea of how icons function to produce identification in comics. Michael Freund (Webster University, Vienna) was unique in presenting on a newspaper strip in “Deconstructing Berzerkistan and Other War Zones: Satire in Doonesbury as an Educational Tool.” Freund discussed the press reception of the BD character’s experiences in the war zones of Vietnam, Afganistan, Kuwait, and Iraq.

Plenary Session

[caption id="attachment_1784" align="alignleft" width="274"] Hannah Means-Shannon talks with David Lloyd[/caption] The plenary session was David Lloyd (V for Vendetta, Kickback), and Steve Marchant (The Cartoonist’s Workshop) of Cartoon Classroom talking about their work. Lloyd offered a polemic on the necessity of separating "sequential art" from "comics" because there are too many preconceptions and too much media baggage surrounding the term "comics," preventing practitioners such as himself from attaining "artist" status. Lloyd's talk and the responses to it suggested that comics' place in the world of art and literature is still vexed even among those who study and produce them. Marchant talked about his work with troubled youth and kids with special needs, showing how making comics helped them with their problems. Marchant's talk captured perhaps the prominent theme of the day: making comics can be an empowering experience for school kids, college and university students, and people on the margins of society, making them invested creators whose artistic production gives them self-esteem and a sense of place in the world. My favourite example from Marchant's talk was some of his work with senior citizens who turned their memories into comics. I don't believe that the results were anthologized and published, but if they were to be, they would make a fabulous work of comic book history. A review of the second day of the conference, whose theme was "Comics and Multimodal Adaptation" will follow in the next day or so.

#76 The Bayeux Tapestry: The World's First Graphic Novel?

Grayb — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 18:48:48 +0000

Hiya, Graphixians. I've been away for a while and wrote this post "on location" in France where I had the chance to view the Bayeux Tapestry up close and personal.* It was a marvellous experience, even with the crowds and the constructed setting, but as I looked at it I was mostly finding myself thinking of how this historical artifact fits the parameters for a graphic novel. I'm not the first person to have this thought. Lots of us who want to see comics taken seriously in an academic context have looked to historical examples of graphic communication as a way to validate or historicize this field of study. What makes the Bayeux Tapestry different than examples of, for example, cave paintings, is that the tapestry combines images and text as we've come to expect graphic narratives to do. The tapestry is also interesting because its narrative follows a long period of time and includes historical backstory. It tells, as I'm sure you know, the history of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. It's a fantastically detailed text; we come to understand motivation, the passage of time, intrigue, deceit, and the complexity of victory. It's a testament to the depth and complexity of the text that people make arguments for it both as a work of victor's history and a challenge to the dominant narrative about Norman Conquest. In and of itself that's kind of cool. I want to focus on the interplay of time in the Bayeux Tapestry, because I think it's the element that makes this storytelling most sophisticated, thereby speaking to the way we read graphic narratives now. Notice here the order of events. King Edward's funeral is occurring in the central panel of the portion shown here. This is the main event in this part of the tapestry because it moves the narrative along. Without Edward's death, we don't have Harald's betrayal and the story doesn't roll forward. So that's the present moment. But look to the right -- the tapestry does not always move chronologically. In this panel, we see the king very ill in the top portion (Harald at his side), and dead in the bottom portion. All of this comes after the funeral scene. The tapestry weavers seem intent on us knowing that the funeral is the central focus, with the next panel serving to explain and illustrate rather than moving the action along chronologically. Isn't that cool? If you're wondering why all this matters, that's totally ok. I'm not sure where I'm headed with these** observations. But I think it's interesting to see the depth and complexity in early graphic texts and to recognize the history of interpretation that we draw upon when we approach graphic narratives. Also, man, I saw the Bayeux Tapestry! And it was really cool! So this is also a post about that. -- * This should be read to mean "through a glass cabinet, mediated by careful lighting and an audio guide, and in a throng of German tourists." ** Or any.

#77 Report on Day 2 of the Third International Conference on Comics: Comics Rock!

wilkinsp — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 21:44:05 +0000

As with my report on Day 1 of The Third International Conference on Comics: Comics Rock!, what follows is a discussion of the panels that I saw on Day 2 when the theme was Comics and Multimodal Adaptation. I have presented ideas as I remember them with some help from my Twitter feed. I have also once again used Damon Herd's notes for a couple of concurrent panels. If you attended the conference and remember things differently, please leave a comment. If you went to different panels than I did, and would like to contribute to the report, please let us know. Analytical Frames for Adaptation Day 2 of the Comics Rock! conference began for me with the panel on “Analytic Frames for Adaptation.” This panel was Canadian-heavy in a Canadian-heavy conference, featuring Dru Jeffries from Concordia University and Bart Beaty of the University of Calgary alongside Simon Grennan of Kartoon Kings as the lone UK representative. This panel was also, for me, the most intellectually exciting of the conference, a real treat. In "The Comic Book Film as Palimpsest" Jeffries discussed how film adaptations “remediate” comics, that is how they not only recast story and character as cinema but attempt to capture and reframe the medium of comics itself. He outlined different kinds of textuality and showed examples of films such as 300 creating “panel effects” using slow motion and freezing. One of Jeffries’ points that struck me was how film operates in “landscape” mode and has difficulties remediating vertically oriented “portrait” panels. Jeffries’ presentation also made me re-consider the argument that Hollywood is destroying comics by co-opting them. The examples of intertextuality showed efforts to satisfy and an allegiance towards the comics aficionado, the person who will be comparing the film adaptation to the original. The film directors appear to be saying, “Don’t hate me; I like the comic too.” Simon Grennan came between the two Canadians. I have seen Simon present before and admire his ability to present theoretical concepts succinctly and precisely. His talk, "Register in the Guise of Genre: Instrumental Adaptation in the Early Comics of Grennan and Sperandio" was about how he and Christopher Sperandio, his partner in Kartoon Kings, have adapted comics to new sociological situations, playing with generic expectations of comics, to produce a kind of discord, a mismatch between generic expectation and social function or context. Grennan and Sperandio adapted covers from 1950s EC comics and used them as covers for museum programs, oral histories, and other public, social forms of art that Grennan and Sperandio perform. I would call the effect of this “misapprehension” a version of the uncanny, a term that Grennan did not use, but that captures the generic familiarity and the alienation of the new context. Beaty’s talk, "Toward a Theory of the Site-Specific Comic: Dave McKean's The Rut," linked interestingly with Grennan’s because he too was discussing comics and context in the case of Dave McKean’s The Rut. The Rut is a site-specific comic, adapted to the gallery space; Beaty saw it at the Pumphouse in Battersea Park in 2010. While comics of late have made their entry into the gallery, Beaty argued, that space is not particularly suited to them; there is a mismatch between the medium and the context, as curators try to figure out how to place comics pages on the gallery wall. But The Rut is a comic taken apart and reconfigured for the gallery space. Pieces of it are on the floor; pieces hang on the wall, and pieces are sculptural. While such an exhibit challenges the notion of the comic as book, it remains comics, said Beaty. In the discussion afterwards, Grennan argued that The Rut worked because of the sociological context of the piece. As “art,” he said, it is awful, but as comic it is something else. Myth and Adaptation The second sets of panels for the day were Pecha Kucha sessions. Pecha Kucha requires 20 slides with the presenter spending 20 seconds on each slide. An interesting way of stressing the visual dimension of presentations, the Pecha Kucha put a constraint on the speaker analogous to constraints that comics artists place upon themselves. Hannah Means-Shannon of Georgian Court University at first thought that format did not allow the presenter to speak, and that the audience would examine each slide in silence for 20 seconds. Fortunately, she was put right before her presentation, “Towards an Auteur Theory of Comics.” Means-Shannon examined the validity and desirability of adapting auteur theory from film, particularly the French New Wave, to comic book production. Auteur theory essentially gives all creative vision and power to the director, and one way of looking at auteur theory is as a means of diminishing the notion of film as a collaborative work. In the case of the comics that Means-Shannon was discussing, the penciller was the auteur, and for comics that adapt works from other media, the auteur theory is a way of exploring how visual artists can assert authority over the work. Means-Shannon focused on P. Craig Russell’s adaptation of the Ring of the Nibelung and Gareth Hinds' adaptation of Beowulf. The fact that the artists are working with classics whose authors are long-dead gives them an authority and autonomy that is frequently lacking when artists have to work with living writers. In the comic book world, the writer is still king. Consider the position of Alan Moore relative to the artists who have rendered his ideas. Means-Shannon used three criteria from Andrew Sarris to assess auteur theory as it applies to comics: technical competence, personal style, and interior meaning. The two artists in question fulfilled these criteria, but not in a way that totally validated auteur theory. Indeed, Means-Shannon expressed concerns about the applicability of this theory to comics, quoting....who said that auteurism led to a cult of personality. I found this presentation interesting in relation to the vexed issue of authorship in comics, both in terms of collaboration between writers and artists and in the notion of the comic as property owned by a large media corporation. Damon Herd of Dundee University and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design presented on Unstable Molecules: The True Story of Comics’ Greatest Foursome by James Sturm as the adaptation of superhero comics to biography. As with several of the other presentations on this day, the boundary between “story world” and reality was contested or at least made permeable in Herd’s discussion of the two texts and their relationship to each other. The most interesting aspect to me of this presentation was the way in which Sturm’s indie comic project co-opts the superhero comic. The two genres are usually viewed as polar, competing opposites in the comics world, that have nothing to do with each other except for medium, but, as Herd showed, they are in fact wound around each other, each unable to exist except in relation to the other. Plenary: Ian Edginton and Ian Culbard, "Adaptation and Design" Ian Edginton and Ian Culbard talked about their process for adapting well-known works of literature into comics. They began by discussing their adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, particularly Culbard’s issues with drawing Dorian's beauty, which is one thing to describe in prose and another to present in cartoon form. One of Culbard’s friends suggested that he use a stick figure as a kind of inversion of that beauty and a testament to the impossibility of drawing it. I thought this suggestion a brilliant one, but Edginton and Culbard did not choose that route. From Edginton’s writer's perspective, the issue for adapting well-known literary works is always what language to include and what to cut out. He knows that whatever choice he makes, readers who love the original text will criticize. Never underestimate the power of a contraction when adapting a literary work to comics, he said. With their Sherlock Holmes adaptations, of which there have been four, the pair wanted to strip away elements of Holmes' dress and persona that movies and television have created to get at Conan Doyle’s vision in the texts themselves. This desire for fidelity struck me as at odds with other presentations at the conference that argued fidelity wasn’t necessarily the key term in considering a successful adaptation. Culbard spoke of the time and effort they put into rendering roomscapes, which made me think about how mapping space was so important in comics. Culbard also made an interesting comment about an artist finding his or her style by failing to copy successfully the work of an artist he or she admired. All the plenary speakers for the conference were creators rather than critics, so the emphasis was on giving an insight into the creative process, on showing rather than arguing or uncovering some new way of reading comics. Authorship In "Moral Rights of Authors and Batman," Ian Gordon of the University of Singapore discussed the issue of who counts as the author of Batman in the light of the Superman court cases surrounding Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel. Gordon pointed out that while Batman’s authorship has never been legally contested--Bob Kane has been credited with inventing the superhero, and his name appears on Batman comics to this day--questions of who has the moral right over the work persist, as they do in many comics that have multiple writers and artists. For example, Kane ultimately did have to acknowledge Bill Finger for his role in Batman’s creation. Gordon also discussed the plight of other contributors to the comic such as Jerry Robinson whom many credit with the invention of the Joker. Gordon recounted how Jack Nicholson received 17% of product royalties from the Batman film in which he played the Joker, but that Robinson, who consulted on the film, got nothing of those royalties. The question authorship and the moral rights that go with it is a troubling one for comics, whose titles tend to be corporate properties. Gordon’s talk thus intersected with Means-Shannons’ discussion of auteur theory. In "Constructing The Pier: Writing for Comics within Transmedia Narratives," Brian Fagence of The University of Glamorgan talked about the role of comics in the transmedia project of The Fallows Narratives, in the segment called The Pier. Fagence went through some examples of transmedial storytelling: films and television shows that have video games and music associated with them, for instance. While in those cases, the transmedia elements tend to be superficial product add-ons, The Fallows Narratives ambitiously has a story world that jumps across media platforms, with no particular one dominating, in order to see how the media transform the message. Fagence showed how Punch and Judy were originary figures for The Fallows Narratives and were transmedial figures in their own right. Because The Fallows Narratives is also a multi-author project, I asked Brian how he was going to avoid the kinds of authorship problems that Ian Gordon was talking about. He said he had no idea but that he would have to start thinking about it. It is worth noting that many of the people working on the project are Fagence’s students, so this project is another of the many mentioned at the conference that bridges creative and critical thinking. Storytelling and Adaptation (From Damon Herd’s Notes) In “Beyond Intertextuality: Case Studies in Adapting Form” Hannah Miodrag of the University of Leicester discussed intertextuality in the work of Harvey Pekar, Gianni De Luca, and David Mazzucchelli. Miodrag raised the question of “who is Harvey Pekar?” in the film version of Pekar’s American Splendor to challenge the notion of identity in the autobiographical work. In Gianni De Luca's Shakespeare adaptations we see pages that are not broken down into panels but several images of the same characters moving across the ‘set’ of the page. This effect made Damon think of Richard McGuire’s Here, in which we see panels within panels depicting a different time in the same location. In David Mazzucchelli’s adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass, Miodrag suggested that the grids represented a New York meta-intertextuality. Adaptation and Characters (From Damon Herd’s Notes) Robert Shail of the University of Wales presented "Anarchy in the UK: The Many Lives of Beryl the Peril," discussing Victorian ideas of childhood and the rise of the middle classes and their relation to the comic. The idea that Beryl engages with particularly is the belief that children are closer to our animal ancestors and therefore should be feared. Beryl is a female counterpart to the British version of Dennis the Menace. In “The Universal Grotesque: Multimodal Film Adaptations and Harvey Pekar, Ian Dawe--yet another Canadian from Selkirk College, used Bakhtin’s theory of carnival and grotesque realism to claim that comics are inherently grotesque and carnivalesque, reflecting our own anxiety about our animal form, so there was a nice link here to Shail’s presentation. Dawe discussed the American Splendor film adaptation and the difference between movement image and time image from Gilles Deleuze's theory of film. "American Splendor the film is like a Russian doll," said Dawe, with layers hidden beneath layers, and characters and actors being different versions of themselves. In one scene the characters are watching themselves portrayed by other actors in a play about their life; the scene in the play has already been depicted in the movie. Adaptation and Multimedia At this point in the day I was losing my sharpness, which was not a fault of the presentations, just too much information to take in in one day! Daniel Merlin Goodbrey of The University of Hertfordshire is an artist who creates web comics. His “Digital Comics--New Tools and Tropes” showed how digitalization was both transforming the possibilities for creating comics and the definition of comics itself. One of the main challenges to this definition is the use of animation in web comics. Usually, animation and comics are considered separate media, but computer technology allows us to embed animations in comics. Goodbrey said that when people ask him if what he’s doing is still comics, his response is that if the viewer controls the reading experience, then whatever he or she is looking at is comics. I was unsure of this point because it made me think of how a remote control on a television, particularly with a digital video recorder, gives the viewer control over the material. At the end of the day, though, these ontological questions don't matter as much as the degree of invention and artistry in play. For example, Goodbrey also showed how scrolling on the computer allows for longer frames than the printed page would allow, such as in Scott McCloud's Zot, refigure the the possiblitities for artistic expression. Tien-yi Chao, of National Taiwan University gave the only presentation on Japanese manga and anime that I saw in “Transmutation of Worlds: Intertextuality between Full Metal Alchemist and Conqueror of Shamballa. Chao talked about the different versions of the manga as it has been adapted for TV and film and how they revised the original, in some case presenting the opposite of the original. As with many adaptations under discussion on the day, adaptation was more about taking liberties and presenting different versions than fidelity to the "original." Creators and audiences want new spins on the material, not the same again. Besides the theme of liberation from the concept of fidelity, the dominant idea of the day was that of the mise en abyme of the storyworld, or infinite diegesis. By jumping from one medium or mode to another, a narrative can create the effect of abandonning any relationship to reality or realism and becoming suspended in a multimodal mirror space. Joan Ormrod, of Manchester Metropolitan University, addressed this issue in “Adapting the Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency from Website to Comic: History, Realism, Narrative." Ormrod discussed the cult status of the website and the way it created an alternative reality in itself with lots of true believers in the vampire and zombie world. In this instance, the line between fiction and reality becomes somewhat porous, as fiction invades or infects reality. Ormrod discussed how this porousness affected the adaptation of the website into the comic, particularly in the creation of characters, as the only character on the website is the mysterious Hugo Pecos. To sum up, the theme of adaptation turned out to be intellectually provocative, inviting more theoretical and technical presentations, perhaps, than the previous day's topic of comics and education. The discussion of education tended to be pragmatic and demonstrative: "here's what I did in the classroom and how successful it was." Adaptation lent itself to more "here's how it works" arguments. The multimodal quality of comic books in themselves, makes the issue of adaptation to and from different media, different contexts, and different worlds particularly complex and thought provoking. The genius of the organizers, particularly Julia Round, was to put a day of praxis next to a day of theory in a way that created a distinct experience for each day.

#78 A Graphixia Review of The Dark Knight Rises

Grayb — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 13:30:00 +0000

... prepare to have the fun sucked out of your favourite franchise. Ok, maybe not, but this is not a gushing, glowing review of The Dark Knight Rises. It is a deeply confused review of the film. I will endeavour not to include too much in the way of spoilers, but you might want to wait to read this until you've seen the film, if only because I don't want to impose my philosophical reading of the film on your experience of it. So, it's a movie about Occupy Wall Street, right? More specifically, it's a movie about rich white Hollywood's anxieties about Occupy Wall Street, right? I'm not the first person to make this observation, but even without having read the reviews discussing the parallels I found myself so distracted by the ham-fisted use of Occupy imagery that I couldn't fall into the story as I expected to. The film shows us just how misunderstood the rich are; they're usurious, sure, and they oppress and suppress without really knowing that they're doing it. But what we find out once they're overthrown is that they were really saving us from ourselves all along. Because poor people go evil *fast*. Like you've got no idea how many people poor people would murder if they got half a chance. The villains of this picture have risen from poverty specifically to kick ass, take names, and destroy World Order. There is no framework in this narrative where the world can be restructured from below and have a positive outcome. Also, visually, let's represent felons as protestors -- let's conflate those two worlds. Also, when we let wrongly imprisoned people out of jail, they're still evil. Just in case you were wondering. The writers say the connections weren't intentional -- of course they weren't. That's how cultural anxieties get worked out on the screen. That's why Godzilla is really about nuclear war and King Kong is about cultural others and Twilight is about anxieties relating to the power of feminism. The Dark Knight Rises demonstrates just how deeply anxiety about class warfare has permeated popular consciousness. Batman is about justice, whether justice aligns with the rule of law or not. Perhaps that's why I found it so frustrating to watch a retelling of Batman's story that seems so careful to infer that, once empowered to act for themselves, the collective 99% are a bunch of fucking morons. And that only Gotham's wealthy patron and caretaker -- even once brought low by the selfish, thoughtless poor people -- can rescue the city and save the people. The benevolence of the elite. They're just better than us. There are some beautiful performances in this film; Joseph Gordon Leavitt and Anne Hathaway are tremendous additions to the franchise, and the film ends on a letter-perfect note for fans of recent developments in the comics. The explosions are fantastic and the cinematography is exquisite. But the confused and problematic politics undermine the positive aspects of the film to leave the end result muddled and unsatisfying.

#80 Of Pulp and Circumstance: The Forbidden Fruit of Y: The Last Man

admin — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 11:00:34 +0000

The cover art of Y: The Last Man cultivates a paradox between the representation of morality--the sexual status quo, the politics of gender--and the representation of a world in which those morals have been subverted. Y: The Last Man is about a subverted world, but it's not about an enlightened world. In fact, the cover art suggests that the comic is established in a long tradition of representing exploitation, perversion, and immorality that is more juvenile fantasy than attempt to challenge the status quo. On the surface, Brian K. Vaughn's Y: The Last Man holds infinite promise. The premise, a world without men, is an old one (Mary Shelley had it first), but one that might allow space for alternate representations of our social melieu, political methodologies, and cultural tensions. Moreover, the subject of the comic's narrative seems oddly suited to a medium that tends to target young boys and renders women into objects of the reader's gaze, stripping them of agency in favour of the caped crusaders, web-slingers and men-of-steel. With its allusions to Shakespeare (Yorick is the skull of self-reckoning in Hamlet--a play in which the lead male character was once played by a Sarah Bernhardt, even) and its consistent cleverness (Dr. Mann is a world full of women), Y: The Last Man isn't shy on literary panache. However, it's the visual allusions to pulp that seem to play against type most significantly. The covers above illustrate Y: The Last Man's play on the graphic tropes of pulp and romance. The covers both place emphasis on the eroticized female, usually on the verge of some sexual triste and about to become involved in something that will affect her moral purity in a negative way--the act of taint usually visualized by some weapon or symbolic phallus. It's all about potential, the potential of what fantasies are between the pages (insert your vagina metaphor here). In Y: The Last Man, potential answers to the source of the plague and the whereabouts of Yorick's girlfriend are continually subverted by female "cat fights" and attempts to corral the last remaining male on earth and his monkey (insert your Mike Myers Sprockets joke here). The above juxtaposition shows the emphasis the covers' art places on draping fabric, light and shadow, postures of fear and submission, accentuating the female body, showing the reader a little of what's underneath hiding just beneath the surface--an interpretive clue in visual form. Those interpretative clues in visual form are what comics are all about and Y: The Last Man, through both its cover art and the art in its pages, to address the underlying queerness of the storyline. Here, the queerness is "fully realized," but in the story, itself based on a man's epic quest to find his girlfriend, the emphasis is on traditional causes, effects, relationships, not on the shifting grounds for sexual politics the plague might bring forward. This point is one of the most frustrating things about Y: The Last Man: it could have done so much, but instead it is and always will be the story of how much women need men and how much, if men were to disappear, women would become like men. For all its potential, Y: The Last Man represents women, for the most part, as idiotic, unable to control their own destiny. Women do everything men would do and cling desperately to the notion that they will get pregnant. The emphasis placed on breasts, whether present or lopped off, suggests a male gaze in control of representing these curvacious, comic-book stereotypes. The literary critic Stanley Fish once noted that the reader of John Milton's Paradise Lost--a subverted moral allegory if there ever was one, albeit unintentionally--was "simultaneously a participant in the action and a critic of his own performance" (i). The covers in the Y: The Last Man series, all heavily indebted to the archetypes of pulp, resist the story's potential as an enlightening glimpse into alternative spaces where gender politics and morality as they are traditionally constructed might be subverted. Instead, the comic relies on a mode of visual representation that cultivates the allure of moral perversion. A world without men, it follows, would be a perversion, but a perversion in which men benefited. The images of the comic nullify any possibility of enlightened representation or discourse in Y: The Last Man by asserting the visual trope of pulp that prioritizes the male's voyeuristic gaze upon the feminine form as the signifier for benign, even exciting, moral perversion; a situation in which the only the female is objectified. All this despite the last man's lonely, singular, and anxious position as object to be gazed upon in possession of the forbidden fruit--one we never see lest it be judged--that will save the human race from extinction.

Works Cited: Fish, Stanley. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. 2nd Edition. Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1997. Vaughn, Brian K. (writer), Pia Guerra (pencils), Jose Marzan (inks). Y The Last Man. Vertigo.

#81 Self-Consciously Academic: Brian K. Vaughan Pushing “Y: The Last Man”

smarsden — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 09:42:03 +0000

[caption id="attachment_1909" align="alignright" width="300"] My "Y: The Last Man" run[/caption] The first issue of Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s “Y the Last Man” came out at the time that I was at the peak of my comic collecting, and from the moment it was advertised (three months prior to its actual publication) it was acknowledged as a guaranteed success solely because of its thesis: the male population is decimated, and there is a single man left to represent and continue humanity (published under DC’s “adults only” Vertigo imprint, no less). Given the predominantly young male readership of comic books, it was a formula that didn’t allow for much in the way of error; Vaughan could have done nearly anything to the plot and the series would have been a best seller if only because of this underlying principle. Surprisingly, however, he did not take the easy way out and follow a lascivious, sex-soaked story of a man taking advantage of being the last male on the planet. Even the characters themselves are aware of this absence, as R.J. points out in issue 22: “You’ve been the last cock on Earth for ages. How could you not bone one girl in that whole time?” Instead, Vaughan capitalizes on the built-in audience and uses the story as a vehicle for often poignant (though sometimes strangely misogynistic) thoughts on gender dynamics, on his politically Democratic leanings and on his thoughts on the Academy. It’s this final point that I find most compelling now, in that Vaughan is so self-consciously literary throughout Y while so openly disparaging of these elements at the same time: Yorick, the Arts’ academic with his self acknowledged “useless BA” (12.11), is presented as a generally static and dull character, important only in that he has survived the plague by happenstance, though he is incredibly pompous besides. He is consistently surprised at womankind’s ability to survive and makes subtly sexist comments throughout the narrative. Despite being very well read (a point that he draws attention to ad nauseum), his character is confounding – one wonders why Vaughan would have left us with such a man, if we were only allowed one, throughout his story. That Yorick is an academic is a point that Vaughan returns to repeatedly in Y, and in the most blatant of ways; not only are he and his sister named after characters from Shakespeare (his father being a Shakespeare professor), he refers to obscure works of literature throughout the series, references that the vast majority of comic readers would not get (mentioning Nathaniel West in issue 18 is a clear example). There are other nods to the literary throughout Y, nearly in every issue, but they’re so blunt that one wonders at the point that Vaughan is making – the play within a play aside, a clear nod to Hamlet, serves no purpose other than to delay the action for two issues. The snide mockery of those who haven’t mastered a language is also an undercurrent of Y, and at times it’s affronting; the Russian spy Natalya who can’t communicate in English states, when allowed to express herself in her own language, “” (11.17). Of the same woman, Yorick notes in a comical way, “Cookie monster speaks better English than you” (13.11). In a story with so compelling a premise, Vaughan keeps bringing us back to the import of communication in a way that seems of little relevance to the central plot, openly belittling those who can't communicate effectively. The references to language and texts become so consistent that their meanings become ambiguous – issue 24 opens with Yorick entering a church, stating “Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret,” followed in the next panel by “Little Judy Blume humor for ya” (24.2). This line isn’t actually humorous, and one wonders who the “ya” is here – Vaughan is attempting to, in a way that is almost pedantic, drop in as many textual references as can be allowed within his narrow page count regardless of their usefulness. Yorick, in the same issue, when Beth attacks and lights him on fire, puts himself out while explaining the correct grammatical usage of articles in a sentence. Being an English guy, I’m all for instruction, but to place it so consistently and in so unrealistic a way disrupts the narrative. In this universe, we have characters discussing their thesis papers and majors set to a backdrop of the potential annihilation of the human race. It’s also important to note that the only other character who highlighted her academic degree is also the first character he deems worthy of pursuing sexually, despite his loyalty to his fiancée to this point in the narrative. Beth in turn continues this type of academically-bent, unrealistic mindset when being attacked by Amazons, asking “you were a theology major too, huh? Where at? Berkeley?” and then, snidely, “yeah, I thought so” (25.17). When the conflict is over, she tells the woman “you’re too smart to be running with those air-heads. When you figure that out, you’re welcome to come back here.” Vaughan makes the same pitch to his readers: read my work in the right context, and make sure to look up my references. Though there are certainly quotable profundities scattered throughout Y (“Once you make it past the scales and blindfold, justice is a woman with a sword” from issue 9 being the most memorable for me), it is, at times, overwhelmingly geared towards justifying itself as being most correctly viewed in an academic context through its dialogue and obscure references, a habit that followed Vaughan into his career in writing for the TV series “Lost.” Moreover, the series is insistent on hyping itself – even by the third issue, it was offering testimonials on its front cover that highlight the fact that “it’s rare to find a comic with such universal appeal, and this book is going to be the next big thing,” with similar quotations following for the next twelve issues. Y the Last man remains a worthwhile read and is, at points, a highly nuanced fable that explores gender construction in a provocative way. It’s also, as is quite clear, purposed at defining itself as outside of the typical graphic novel; apropos nothing, Agent 355 notes “they can say Fuck in comic books? Jeez, they never said stuff like that in Superman” (11.3). Vaughan offers us a compelling (if convoluted) 60 issue story that seems bent on being as academically minded as possible in order to guarantee discussion long after the story itself has been told in a way that mainstream superhero storylines are rarely granted – the same tactics have been arguably used throughout literature just as obviously, with Finnegan’s Wake being a prime example. Yorick is a dull and generally static character who is often self-deprecating, and while there is some everyman quality in this, the literary references and consistent acknowledging of the import of formal, academic education is too evident to be ignored. It’s also clear that Vaughan’s style has paid off to this end, with a trilogy of films currently on the edge of pre-production and his collected series earning new reprints in expensive, deluxe hardcover editions. By avoiding the obvious approach to his central concern given his market of predominantly adolescent males, he offers us a story that is worthy of rereading in the classroom, even if the self-conscious desire to be perceived as such is immediately visible in the text. Works Cited: Vaughn, Brian K. (writer), Pia Guerra (pencils) and Jose Marzan (inks). Y The Last Man. New York: Vertigo.

#82 Representing the Margins: Deciphering Visual Clues in Y: The Last Man

Ashley Ollen — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 17:19:46 +0000

The following is a Guest Post by Ashley Olien who has recently completed the Master of Liberal Studies Program at the University of Minnesota. Her Master's thesis, How GLBTQ Characters are Depicted in Contemporary Comic Book Fiction: Ethical Implications, examines some of the ways that gender and sexuality are explored in the graphic novel series Y: the Last Man. You can follow her on Twitter @Londonlux

In their recent posts about Y: the Last Man, Peter Wilkins and David N. Wright take a hard stance regarding Vaughn and Guerra’s representation of gender. While I agree that this series both reflects and reinforces a long standing fear of gender non-conformity and sexual freedom, I feel that these recent posts have failed to take some important factors into consideration. In his book, Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art, Scott McCloud uses the word “icon,” defining it for his own purposes to mean “any image used to represent a person, place, thing or idea” (McCloud 27). Essentially, what McCloud points out is that comic book artists often rely on socially recognizable images that convey a large amount of information despite their simplicity. Wilkins discusses this idea, arguing that Y: the Last Man does not provide enough information to give the reader a sense of the female characters as discrete individuals. He argues that “Guerra’s images of women as complete individuals are indistinct” and that the “bodies of all the female characters are more or less indistinguishable.” While I agree that, in general, many of these women share the same general body shape, the art provides plenty of other information which helps the reader to distinguish one character from another. In Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, Charles Hatfield quotes Perry Nodelman who claims that, with regard to picture books, “all visual images, even the most apparently representational ones, … require a knowledge of learned competencies and cultural assumptions before they can be rightly understood” (Hatfield 37). Comic book artists use images which are easily understood by the general public. They often depend on stereotypes to help define characters as certain types of people. For example, an artist may use hairstyles, clothing or other visual cues to help the reader quickly identify the race, gender and sexual orientation of a character. Essentially, stereotypes become a type of shorthand which allows the artist to communicate efficiently with the reader. The image that Wilkins chooses to provide as an example happens to be one of a character who is a former super model. Wilkins completely neglects to mention all of the many images where characters with more variant gender identities are portrayed. Agent 355, for example, is almost always portrayed as very masculine. In this piece of cover art Agent 355 is dressed, as usual, in a bulky black jacket and black pants. Her hair is pulled back into braids, highlighting her square and masculine facial structure. In her left hand she is holding a gun. Each of these features provides the reader with a piece of information that helps them to interpret her as a certain type of woman. This distinction becomes even more clear when her image is contrasted with that of Dr. Mann, who is shown to be far more feminine. This piece of art is consistent with the way that these two characters are depicted through much of the series (a discussion of Agent 355’s growing femininity is, perhaps, best left for another time). As we have been discussing Agent 355’s masculinity, I think it is also important to point out that Y: The Last Man addresses not only the traditional gender binary (A gender system that classifies sex and gender as two distinct categories: male and female), but also introduces the idea of gender variance. Sex and gender are major components of the plot. The “Gendercide” is an event in which all mammals with a Y chromosome are killed off. The term itself conveys a strong message. “Gendercide” refers neither to social gender nor the existence of sex organs, but to the most basic idea of what constitutes male or female. Whether a character exhibits complex gender identity or complex sexuality is of no significance. Having an X or Y chromosome is the only factor that determines whether or not someone in this story will survive. This is problematic because it minimizes the complexity of what has come to be known as gender identity. In his book, Imagining Transgender: an Ethnography of a Category, David Valentine lays out the ways that the term “transgender” has evolved and grown into an umbrella category that encompasses multiple gender identities. There are several instances in which Y: the Last Man attempts to represent characters who could be identified as transgender. One place where gender variance is shown is in the ninth book, Motherland. Here, two women come across a man in a cemetery. One of the women exclaims, “it’s a guy! We found a real guy!” (Vaughn, 9. 99). This comment is problematic because it implies that there is something specific that marks a person as rightly belonging to one gender or another. The two women, shown wielding shovels, appear threatening and clearly frighten the man. Afraid of what could happen, the man exclaims, “No! I’m a working girl. I’ll rip off the stupid goatee if you don’t believe me. I swear, I just dress up like men for other women!” (Vaughn, 9. 99). One of the women, then, responds by saying, “back up, you pretend to be part of the patriarchy?” (Vaughn, 9.100). This comment suggests that to display a gender identity contrary to one’s sex at birth is to pretend. This situation suggests that there is something wrong and not genuine about the way the character, and the real people being represented, perform gender. While there are many issues with this depiction, its very existence demonstrates a complexity that seems to have been neglected in the previous posts. While I do not always agree with the way that some of the characters are represented, I do believe that Vaughn and Guerra have done a brilliant job of exposing some of the problems that our society experiences when representing gender identities. In fact, I so strongly disagree with Wright’s statement that “it could have done so much, but instead it is and always will be the story of how much women need men” that I question whether or not we read the same series.

Works Cited

Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. 1st ed. Jackson, MS: The University Press of Mississippi, 2005. vii–182. Print

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. 1st ed. NewYork, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, inc., 1993. 2–215. Print.

Valentine, David. Imagining Transgender: an Ethnography of a Category.Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007. XI–302. Print.

Vaughn, Brian K. (w), Pia Guerra (p). and Jose Marazan Jr. (i). Y: The Last Man vols. 1–10 New York, NY. DC Comics. 2003–2008.

#83 Stuff Scott Almost Talked About But Didn't Re: Y: The Last Man

Grayb — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 18:20:43 +0000

I am known for my catchy post titles, readers. In Scott's post on Y, he talked about the self-consciously academic nature of the text. It was an interesting post, but I think he missed one of the most interesting metatextual/pseudo-academic debates in the text that all centres around a lighter Yorick carries and the symbolism it embodies. This moment comes about in Book 3, One Small Step, and I think two important things are happening here. First, Vaughan is using Yorick to allude to the debate of nomenclature in the world of comics scholarship. While I think now most everyone has agreed not to care so much, for a time there (around 2002 when Y: The Last Man was first published), anxiety about having comics scholarship taken seriously meant that we all sat around a lot of conference tables having a lot of largely pointless discussions about whether or not it was okay to call them comics or if we had to call them graphic novels or if they were really something altogether different entirely. Yorick's ironizing of the term "graphic novel" (by using quotation marks) and his clarification that what he means is, in fact and of course, a "comic book," speaks to the apparent silliness of such a debate. The anxieties were those of critics, not comic producers or consumers, ostensibly; Yorick feels silly saying "graphic novel" and knows that the clear and comprehensible term is comic book. Second, the comic book Yorick is alluding to is a series called Preacher by Garth Ennis. In Preacher, which ran from 1995-2000, Jesse Custer is a Texas preacher who gets possessed by an entity that causes the destruction of his church and his congregation. This possession, complicatedly both evil and good in equal measure, make Custer incredibly powerful and sets him on a path to find God. So why the lighter? It's an incredibly masculinized symbol in Preacher, and stands similarly in Y: The Last Man. In Preacher, the lighter had belonged to Custer's father -- a man murdered before Custer's eyes when he was six. So there's a patrilineal heritage to the lighter that places it in a very masculine space. Custer's father received the lighter when he was serving in Vietnam, to amp up the dudeliness quotient and little more, and was a gift from John Wayne, if we just want to get ridiculous and stupid about the Y-chromosomal nature of the lighter. It's a boy thing, okay? Passed down from boy to boy to boy forever and ever, from the boyest boy who ever boyed, John Wayne. And now Yorick has it. This effectively ties Yorick to an alpha-male history in contemporary comic book narratives. So if you weren't sure that Yorick is the manly man to man up this manless situation, you are now. He carries a talisman of his masculinity that gives him six degrees of separation from John Wayne, for goodness sake. Which gets at the heart of what annoys me about Y: The Last Man. It's a rollicking good story most of the time and a lot of fun, but if Vaughan thinks he's created some kind of feminist text he's out of his mind. I really wanted the female characters to have some kind of power but they don't really. They probably needed a penis lighter of their own.

#84 Eddie Campbell at the Crossroads

wilkinsp — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 04:34:45 +0000

The universe had been trying to get me to look at some Eddie Campbell comics for some time now and has finally succeeded. A year or so ago, a friend and colleague gave me a copy of From Hell, the version of the Jack the Ripper story that Alan Moore wrote and Campbell illustrated. I’m ashamed to say that I have yet to read it. The cover image did not strike me at the time as my cup of tea: all blood and gore. But my recent experience reading Alec: The Years Have Pants suggests that I will be getting to it soon. Then I read Jared Gardner’s “Storylines” in SubStance, an article that probes the notion of the comic book artist’s style or “line” in which Gardner analyzes Campbell’s work in From Hell and Alec, stating that “Campbell’s line is like Hemingway’s prose style—distinctly his own no matter what he writes…” (62). By this Gardner does not mean that Campbell’s work is always the same, just that once you’ve seen it, if you see it again, you know it. Campbell’s style varies tremendously through the Alec omnibus, but it remains his. When I was at the 3rd International Conference on Comics in Bournemouth in June, a colleague I met there, Damon Herd, recommended that I pay a visit to Gosh Comics in London and made an aside that Hayley Campbell, Eddie Campbell’s daughter, ran the Gosh Comics twitter feed. Also at that conference was Paul Gravett, who figures prominently in Alec. I recall chatting with Paul on the stairs of the Bournemouth University Executive Centre and him saying, “The stairs are our friend.” Now when I picture that moment, I imagine it drawn by Eddie Campbell. I knew Gravett from the big book he edited, 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die, but reading Alec made me see what a pivotal figure Gravett has been in the comics scene in the UK since the 1980’s, with his Fast Fiction book stall and Escape magazine. Once I started reading Alec, Damon and another friend whom I met at a conference, Pepo Perez, had a good twitter conversation about what we liked about Eddie Campbell. The discussion mostly turned on two things: the “scratchy,” “rough and ready” quality of Campbell’s line, and Campbell’s relationship to superhero comics. Campbell’s style could never be called “clear line”. Rather it appears in a rough and sketchy pen and ink style. In Kitchen Sink Grafitti, for instance, Campbell draws loosely, with less concern for outline than for the volume and proportions of bodies and objects. Perfect scribbles is one way of thinking of the drawings. Consider this bike. Eddie Campbell knows how to draw bikes. Damon said that after spending a day trying to draw a bike, he really appreciated this cartoon. Because Campbell is the master of proportion and volume, the drawings never look amateurish, but they do manage to convey the idea of a life lived and recorded quickly, as if Campbell had to rush to get things down in order to get on to the next event in his life. The extra scratchy, scribbly quality of Graffiti Kitchen matches the “lost in the wilderness” aspect of Alec’s life at the moment: he’s carrying on with an artist, Jane, and her daughter, George, at the same time. Campbell uses this series to not only tell his own story but the story of comics also: the story of how he fits into the history of comics. A key moment is when young Eddie (I believe Campbell has given up the "Alec" name at this point) is in hospital after being struck by a car. When the nurse hands out comics, he gets The Beano while the boy in the next bed gets a copy of Strange Tales. The grass, of course, is greener on the other side, and when the boy falls asleep, Eddie goes over and examines the comic, falling in love with Lee and Kirby’s style. The rest is history. So Campbell is yet another comics artist whose mileu is autobiographical and/or ‘indie’ comics who deliberately invokes the superhero history of comics by making frequent reference to them. Unlike Chris Ware, say, Campbell makes no bones about his relationship to the superhero comic as the “other” of more “serious” comics. It is a source of unadulterated pleasure for him, and one of Campbell’s refreshing qualities is his big tent vision of comics. Several panels in How to be an Artist are simulacra of other artists’ work: from Milton Caniff to Art Spiegelman. Eddie Campbell seems quite happy to situate himself at the crossroads of all the different styles of comics, even though his home in Brisbane, Australia makes this crossroads stylistic and ecumenical rather than geographic. If you fused Paul Gravett and Eddie Campbell, you would have some kind of comics superhero. One man spreading the gospel, the other illustrating it with the keen eye of the court sketcher. Works Cited Campbell, Eddie. Alec: The Years Have Pants (A Life-Sized Omnibus). Marietta: Top Shelf, 2009. Accessed via Comixology. Gardner, Jared. “Storylines.” SubStance. 124. 40.1, 2011. 53-69. Moore, Alan (writer), Eddie Campbell (art). From Hell. Marietta: Top Shelf, 2006.

#85 Who's Writing "Inside Woody Allen"?

admin — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 12:10:15 +0000

The answer to the question in the title of this post is Stuart Hample, who wrote and illustrated the daily / weekly strip from 1976 to 1984. The premise was simple, take the persona of Woody Allen—the one you know from movies, befuddled redhead anxiety attack with glasses—and transfer it to the comics strip page. Hample received permission from Allen to produce the comic and, according to Hample, Allen was loosely involved in its production, often sending in one-liners or full jokes to be used in the serialized strip.

My interest in the strip locates itself not around Woody Allen per se, but how the strip enacts some interesting problems associated with reading comics (strips or novels). The first is the obvious question of authorship, as the title suggests. Who exactly is writing “Inside Woody Allen”? Hample comes up with the bulk of the material, but the persona in which that material materializes (sorry) is already well-formed and worked through. Anyone who listens to Allen’s nightclub act from the mid 1960s cannot help but be impressed with the already fully formed persona that would later become irrevocably attached to Allen himself. The pity one-liners, the intelligence of the routines (Kant, Weber, Marx, all mentioned), and the self-depricating, self-referential, deconstruction that leads to the punch-line. All these elements are present in Hample’s strip, which leads me to ask: who’s writing?

Of course, the above creative trajectory is not isolated to “Inside Woody Allen.” Plainly, it mimics all comicbook writing that takes place within the tradition itself: superheroes, memoir, even those “for beginners” books. The characters within the comics canon are, for the most part, near fully formed when they are taken up by new authors who, while certainly re-writing and adding their own slant to the traditional character, must write within established paradigms. To put it baldly, they have to respond to the established routine by at the very least acknowledging it. While Hample takes an actual living person as his inspiration—and subject—he still must acknowledge and immerse himself in the mimicry of the Woody Allen mythological character before proceeding. And, to some extend, the audience needs to be in on the joke--they have to be aware of, even steeped in Woody Allen's delivery, persona, and references. That creative process, one steeped in learning about the subject to be represented rather than inventing it, is a very “modern” way of myth-making. What “Inside Woody Allen” illustrates, well ahead of its time, is a kind of modern myth-making in which the persona means more than the individual; the routine more than the nobility of the deed or the lessons it teaches. We move away from myth as repeated story to myth as repeated motif, and in the process we read ourselves and our cultural production differently. In an odd twist given the Woody Allen as subject motif, myth-making becomes more self-referential, more historically bound, and more susceptable to shifting cultural currents.

What “Inside Woody Allen” and indeed most comics show is the transience of myth; its adapatability and its mutations, rather than its moral certainty. We become conditioned to accept variations in the routine, almost without bounds (Britney Spears starting working on a whole new level when she shaved her head, but she was still working). “Inside Woody Allen” had better not represent entirely the Woody Allen we've already seen, or else we’re not interested. But, he better not be too different than the Woody Allen we've come to expect. The same dichotomy is visible, to some extent, in any “re-writing” of stable comics characters or within the reformulation of consistent narratives. We are always jazzed by something like The Dark Knight Returns or Civil War, but it’s still Batman, and it’s still classic. Even something as innovative as Watchmen (itself in the midst of a re-write) is locked within its own mythology, the mythology of superheroes, and the mythologies of detective fiction. The most succinct way to put things might be to say that reading comics is about waiting for the punch line: the inevitable, but unexpected, arrival at an end-point from which we will begin again. That “Inside Woody Allen” managed an eight-year run by repeating Allen’s stand-up motifs from the ten years before the strip’s creation is testiment to the power of the consistent set-up. And, it’s a short step from such statements to iconic images of repetition in comics such as George Herriman’s brick, Batman’s cowl, or Art Speigleman’s cats and mice. To put all this in perspective is to say that comics represent some of the most stable historiographies in modern life. The mythologies they create and represent, no matter how up-to-date, necessarily call forth the past from which they are born no matters the variables or transmutations. Moreover, that past is irrevocably connected to whatever new storyline, punchline, or representation that emerges, forever bringing forward and alluding to previous acts. "Inside Woody Allen" re-writes Woody Allen not as an individual or even as a persona, but as a immutable myth endlessly riffing on a theme; immortality by not dying indeed.

#86 Nobody Likes Chester Brown Except Me (and You)

Grayb — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 19:07:07 +0000

When I first arrived at Graphixia, it was to write about Chester Brown's Louis Riel as a work of Canadian literature. (You can read that post here.) That was almost 70 Graphixia posts ago now, and I thought I'd take the opportunity of this theme-less round of posting to revisit Chester Brown and his work, this time looking at his autobiographical I Never Liked You, which tells the story of Brown's teen years and his attempts to cope with both his own crippling introversion and his mother's progressing schizophrenia. It's a heavy read, but it's also considered one of the best graphic novels of all time by wise and enlightened people like Gilbert Hernandez and the folks at Comics Journal. I thought it might be time we take another look at Chester Brown's work. At heart, this is a coming-of-age story, albeit a coming-of-age-in-difficult-circumstances story (though aren't they all). Hanging over the narrative is Brown's mother, a tragic figure who seems to just exist on the edges of being whole and human in protagonist Chester's life. She is simultaneously an oppressive figure (her admonishments about the use of foul language seem to effectively silence Chester's interactions with his peers and damage his relationships with other people his age) and a fragile one (she is on the edges of illness throughout the narrative, and dies in absentia while Chester and his brother are visiting their grandparents). But she is, above anything else, emblematic of Chester's inability to express himself emotionally. The title of the novel is I Never Liked You, which is hurled at Chester by a scorned life-long crush, but it's Chester's own battle with the phrase "I Love You" that forms the crux of the conflict in the novel. And what one does with such a declaration once it has been made is equally puzzling for Chester. It's relatively easy for him to blurt out his love, sputtering and teenaged as it is, but what comes after? The intimacy of dating, the aspect of trying new things, is more than he can bear -- and perhaps too the sense that love, as the philosopher John Mayer tells us, "is a verb / It ain't a thing." It's the action aspect of his love for Skye that he finds so difficult to work out. With his mother, he can't express his love in either words or actions. His restraint is partly imposed by her volatility and discomfort in her own skin, but also by his own lack of a sense of his role within the family. As the eldest son, he feels a sense of responsibility. Crippled by his painful introversion, he fears anything that takes him out of his comfort zone (which, incidentally, is not that comfortable for our tortured soul -- depicted here by the use of the heavy, imposing black background that blots out anything in his non-interior life). So when she asks him to cycle to the Metro to pick up hamburger meat, he refuses, upsetting and alienating his mother and angering his little brother who is forced to fulfill his older brother's role. And then, when he visits her on her deathbed, he finds himself unable to express his love in words. He's unaware that it's his last chance to tell his mother that he loves her, and he squanders it, which is the central trauma of the text. Chester is a complex protagonist in that readers are not really sure whether or not he wants to be rescued or released from this world or not. He seems at peace with his disconnection and not terribly troubled by it; in the end, I think that's what makes the narrative compelling -- Chester is an everyman, plagued by demons that ultimately bring him comfort and encourage his complacency. At the end of the text, he is 17 and Skye, the object of his crush, is 15 -- she asks him to go to the fair, and he says no. He needs to mow the lawn, he says, and then listen to the new KISS album. He is left, at the end of the text, alone in his silo -- and there's something likable in him in that.

#87 Who's the Villain Here? "Avengers vs X-Men" and the Summer Blockbuster

smarsden — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 04:52:16 +0000

As this is a free-for-all month at Graphixia, I wanted to turn to what I’m perceiving as a current trend in the big two publishers: the nature of villainy, in mainstream superhero comics, is changing dramatically. From Classics Illustrated onwards, comics have been pedagogical tools, used primarily for the delivery of morality through black and white, binaristic perspectives of right and wrong. We see these largely in the characters of early Captain America and Superman, along with their nemeses Red Skull and Lex Luthor, though comicdom in general is founded on these moral tales – the early heroes always had their foils in the foreground, ready to serve as the antithetical response to the how the reader was meant to react when faced with a moral decision. The summer blockbuster “events” of the past few years, however, have upset the binaries that superhero comics were founded on, problematizing their use as morality texts in potentially very productive ways. Early crossover events, such as Infinity Gauntlet or Crisis on Infinite Earths, had villains at their cores (Thanos and the Anti-Monitor respectively) with whom it was impossible to identify – their goals were always the destruction of their universes or simple genocide, forcing the reader to read with the heroes’ aims of foiling their devious plots. From Civil War onwards though, this trend towards guiding reader response has shifted to demand more of the reader, leaving ambiguity in place of the previous moral binary. Civil War, a text that literally asked in its promotional materials, “whose side are you on?”, pitted Iron Man and Captain America against one another in a contest that was politically charged; it came to blows, as comics do, though the heart of the conflict centred on registration of superheroes in order to make them accountable for their actions and the potential destruction they cause while fighting their nemeses. This plot, offered against the backdrop of the institution of the Patriot Act in the United States, refused to offer a discernible position. Gone, arguably for the first time in a summer event, was the impetus to guide the reader to a predictable conclusion. Gone as well was the heavy handed, singular morality, with each crossover demonstrating the various authors’ political leanings. From this series onwards, comics appear to have entered into a new age that plays to moral ambiguity, often ignoring traditional villains altogether to pursue stories that involve readers more and make them question their own values when engaging with the characters. Siege, Marvel’s event from two years ago, proposed a similar conflict as was delivered in Civil War, with Harry Osborne (the “reformed” Green Goblin), legally in charge of Marvel’s version of the FBI in his nation-wide task force H.A.M.M.E.R. Though the details of the crossover event are too varied to be discussed here, the theme was again political in nature: a hard, Republican right represented by the very effective Osborne regime, with the more Democrat leaning Avengers who had been driven underground by the change in government structure. Though Osborne eventually snaps under the pressure of his position and power returns to the heroes, the storyline echoed through the Marvel Universe throughout the following year, notably in the mini-series followup “Osborne,” begging readers to continue to juxtapose the shifting worldviews of the fictional world of Marvel comics with their own, media-skewed and uncertain political environments. This hesitant moral structure in superhero comics’ events is still in full swing, this summer in the crossover “Avengers vs X-Men.” While there is certainly a blockbuster feel to the storyline (as evidenced by the parallel mini-series “Vs” that simply offers fights without plots) the series again shows the ambiguous turn in comics’ morality. Though the series is currently running and its conclusion still uncertain, the crux of this conflict centres on the individual freedom of a mutant girl, Hope Summers, who is about to be possessed by a lethal, possibly uncontrollable force from the cosmos that has the potential to eradicate humankind. While the human-but-powered Avengers want to contain the threat by imprisoning Hope and thereby stop the impending disaster, the mutant X-Men see the possessing force as a means of rebooting their dying species while touting Hope’s right to individual freedom. That both sides of the conflict are represented by "heroes" means that the reader is drawn not to the traditional good versus evil but must make up his own mind as to where he stands regarding the morally complex issue of sacrificing personal freedom for the greater good - most significant is that both sides of the argument are legitimate, depending on the reader's personal views. The series is, again, still running as of this posting, and is worth reading if only for the intellectual appeals it makes to its readers. Perhaps this trend towards complexity and upsetting traditional moral binaries simply shows that superhero comics’ readership is aging and has had its fill of the predictable pedagogical tales of the past. Possibly, however, this turn is indicative of changing expectations of media more generally: as entertainment becomes progressively more interactive and socially driven, a storyline that makes demands of its readers regarding how to respond emotionally to the events of the text may be anachronistic, a product of an earlier age. These new summer events, in which the big two invest so much of their resources and which represent the bulk of their annual sales, intentionally lead the reader to question his or her personal worldview by offering morally ambiguous situations that defy the use of comics as simple instructional tools on right and wrong. Regardless of the reasons behind the shift in storytelling, the nature of these complex plots and their open-ended resolutions beg the question as to whether popular comics are on the cusp of an academic turn more generally by eschewing moral certainties for greater reader investment – in this new world, today’s villain may be yesterday’s hero, and the moral of the story lies within you, not any artificial arbiter of right and wrong.

#88 Not Safe for Work: The Joys of Oglaf

wilkinsp — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 04:15:21 +0000

This month at Graphixia we are writing about webcomics. While concerns abound about the fate of the comics publishing industry, and newspapers fail daily, webcomics are slowly gaining ground as a possible destiny of the medium. One of the most popular webcomics is Oglaf, a sword and sorcery pornographic comedy; or as the Australian creators Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne write, “This comic started out as an attempt to make pornography. It degenerated into sex comedy pretty much immediately.” But Oglaf looks like it could be a Sunday full-colour newspaper comic, apart from its overt sexual themes and explicit depiction. Because Cooper and Bayne update Oglaf every Sunday, we can view it as the flagship Sunday comic of the internet universe, where the moral restrictions of the “family newspaper” hold no sway. The internet hasn’t exactly changed the content of sexual representation, which has always been around, including erotic comics by artists like Guido Crepax. There is nothing new under the sun. But what the internet has changed is the relationship between the world of that representation and the world of conventional media. The world of “porn” exists not beneath a veil of repression, or compartmentalized behind the secret room of the “Adult” section of the video store, but is instead a “parallel” world on the web, existing next to, not beneath, conventional media. We don’t even have to hide ourselves away to access it. While I’ve seen a lot of twitter commentary chastising people reading Fifty Shades of Grey openly on public transit, generally the sense is that the Kindle and the iPad allow us to inhabit the world of the “family newspaper” bodily, while our minds can inhabit erotic realms that technology makes possible. Oglaf revels in its status as the internet porn version of the Sunday comic. For example its “Not Safe for Work” warning mocks the legal status of such warnings: “Please click on the button below to certify you’re over 18. Of course if you are under 18, you can’t legally certify anything. So if you’re a minor, please get a parent or guardian to click the button which says you aren’t. Thankyou.” The image of the latex clad woman with the riding crop offers ancillary encouragement. Oglaf pokes fun at the way we try to convince ourselves that the boundary between the porn world of the internet and the conventional moral sphere still functions. The rotating jokes that introduce the comics include lines like, “Don’t punish me for loving you. That’s the court’s job” and “All models are over 18. Or over 21 where required by law.” Oglaf plays with the quasi-veiledness of our fetishes and fantasies. In the comic’s take on One Thousand and One Nights Scheherazade makes her story interesting to herself by fantasizing about men making love while telling the story of a man and a woman: ; But perhaps the most interesting feature of the Oglaf world is the control the female characters exert over sexuality. The main thread revolves around the Mistress, who practices magic, and her hapless apprentice, Ivan. The Mistress toys with and torments Ivan, who never appears to learn any skills. She has cast a spell on him so that every time he masturbates, he releases a “cumsprite” who immediately runs to the mistress to tell on him for a special reward: The piratical Vanka uses her sexual powers against both men and women in ways that assert her control of the phallus. And when the conventional male hero fails to save a town by melting the Snow Queen with his lovemaking—his penis breaks off because of the cold–the mercenary Greir takes over with a strap-on dildo to claim the reward. She then straps the dildo onto the man who lost his penis and walks out of town with her sack of gold. This sexual empowerment of the female characters is perhaps the main distinction between Oglaf and old-fashioned erotic comics. Female agency is fun and funny in Oglaf. The main source of humour is Cooper and Bayne inverting and/or disrupting the tropes of fairy tales and myth, adapting them to porn comedy and breathing new life into them. My favourite examples are the sweary dwarves of “One Sleep ’Til Princemas,” whose speech patterns immediately invoke a certain masculine type: The freedom with which Cooper and Bayne play with sexual imagery and concepts invites a re-consideration of the role of the sexual imagination in the “Big Two” comics. The pneumatic women and bulked up men of the super-hero world start to look as if their bodies are overblown with pent up sexual repression. If anything like what goes on in Oglaf were to enter their world, they would pop like pricked balloons.

Unboxing Building Stories

admin — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 21:55:58 +0000

Unboxing Chris Ware's Building Stories from Digital Cultures Lab on Vimeo.

#78 A Graphixia Review of The Dark Knight Rises

Grayb — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 13:30:00 +0000

#79 Iconicity, Caricature, and the Female Form in Y the Last Man and Locas

wilkinsp — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 11:00:17 +0000

Every few months Graphixians meet to determine our themes and texts for the upcoming posts. While this thinking ahead produces stability and coherence, it also produces frustration, because we often find something other than the assigned theme or text that captures our interest more than it does. The phenomenon is like having to read books for a class when we would rather be reading something else. This preamble is a long way of saying that while I'm supposed to be writing about Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra's Y the Last Man, I really want to discuss Jaime Hernandez' Locas series of Love and Rockets. So I'm going to cheat a bit by discussing Y the Last Man in relation to Locas on the theme of gender and representation, particularly on iconicity, caricature and the female form.

DC's recent teaser of a Catwoman cover has instigated a familiar discussion in the comics criticism world of the depiction of women superheroes as sexualized fantasy objects, pneumatic porn actresses in skintight costumes. We have participated in this discussion on Graphixia before. While Catwoman's pose on the cover has been described as unrealistic or even impossible, arguments about “realism” are vexed when it comes to superhero comics or science fiction stories. The discussion is reminiscent of arguments about Barbie dolls; they are less about reality than about the suitability of icons. "Is Barbie or Catwoman an appropriate icon for contemporary femininity?" is the real question. In this context, iconicity has to do with ideals and what we can identify with, not with what we actually are.

[caption id="attachment_1848" align="aligncenter" width="295"] (36)[/caption]

Icons and iconicity are key to our understanding of comic books. Scott McCloud argues in Understanding Comics that the more iconic an image of a person or face is, the more the audience can identify with it. The less the image looks like a specific person, the more the viewer can put him or herself in the picture, so to speak. For McCloud, an icon is an image drained of specificity. The image of the character must be recognizable as a person but not one that would alienate the viewer or disallow him or herself from imagining being that person. This idea is a puzzling one, as it suggests that stick figures or the images that indicate who may enter what toilet are the ones we most identify with.

Furthermore, the most famous comics characters are instantly recognizable, thanks to features that make them them and not others. Superman's curl, Clark Kent's glasses, Tintin's trousers, and Obelix's pigtails and belly all allow readers to identify immediately whom they are looking at. These identifying features make us consider the relationship between icon and caricature. The two terms appear to conflict, as one removes specificity and identity (at least in McCloud's definition) while the other confers them by metonymy (or perhaps synecdoche). We might even say that this tension defines the visual representation of character in comics. The featureless “icon” and the distinctly-marked “caricature” work together hand in hand; otherwise, we can't tell Charlie Brown from Lucy or Linus. The skill of the comic book artist is to find a balance between caricature and iconicity that is both aesthetically satisfying and conveys character. And the demands of comic book drawing, the need to repeat the image of a character over and over again play their part in this balance. If a character's image changes too much from panel to panel, the artist runs the risk of having the reader lose the identification of that character. Vaughn and Guerra's Y the Last Man and Hernandez' Locas allow us to explore this tension. To my mind the representation of women in The Last Man fits McCloud's definition of iconic representation as absence of feature in comic book pictoral characterization, while the representation of women in Locas fits the notion of balance between iconicity and caricature that I am trying to draw out. Or rather, The Last Man presents women “universally” as a set of norms and ideals while Locas presents women “particularly” as discrete individuals. [caption id="attachment_1861" align="aligncenter" width="252"] (12)[/caption]

Guerra's images of women as complete individuals are indistinct; they could be anybody. Certain features identify each character, certainly, but only minimally. And the identifying features are all facial. The bodies of all the female characters are more or less indistinguishable. You could take the head off of one and stick it on the body of another and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. This is not to say that Guerra's art is somehow "bad." Rather, it follows the pattern of the corporate comics project. Vertigo, which publishes Y, is an offshoot of DC, which in turn is a subsidiary of Time Warner. Artists working for such companies presumably have to satisfy executives, who in turn have to satisfy their reading public to sell sufficient copies. The reading public of Vertigo comics has certain "iconic" demands. The effect of all this is that the drawings in your average corporate comic book have the same relationship to ordinary people as Hollywood movie stars do.

When Paul Chadwick draws Y the Last Man, as he does for a couple of issues, the images become more sexually iconic to the point of becoming Barbie-like. In his first issue, a tension emerges between this iconicity and the substance of the story, which revolves around a troupe of women actors. In a reversal of the acting conditions of Shakespeare's time, all the actors are, of course, women, and women have to take on men's roles. The women of the Nebraska town they are currently visiting want a gender-stereotyped production: they want the troupe to re-enact and update soap operas such as The Days of Our Lives. The actors have no interest: they want to break these stereotypes and much of their dialogue revolves around this subject. But Chadwick's art totally contradicts this dialogue: the actors wear bright red lipstick and cropped tops that show off their breasts--the post-male world has had no effect on the presentation of femininity to the masculine gaze, apparently. Even as the characters strike out against gender stereotypes the way they are drawn reasserts them. What gets me about the Chapman-drawn issues is their have your cake and eat it too approach to gender representation. It makes me want to turn to Danger Girl, of which I'm a fan because of its unabashed, over the top sexualization of its characters. I am reminded here of Slavoj Zizek's argument that the "Stalinist" father is ethically superior to the "liberal" father because, ultimately, he is "more honest."

In his Locas stories in Love and Rockets, Jaime Hernandez does something different with the female form--indeed with all his characters--in order to establish both identity and the evolution of that identity. He focuses mainly on two women, Maggie Chascarillo and Hopey Glass, who assume shapes and personalities of their own as the series progresses. In the world of corporate comics, women like Maggie are few and far between if only because of her body shape, which is an integral part of her character. As Maggie struggles with depression and ages, her body shows the effects. This transformation has less to do with "realism" than with particularity and specificity. Hernandez embodies Maggie in his artwork, and that embodiment evolves over time. Hopey, Maggie's on and off again lover, also evolves. She gets skinnier and more “butch” as Maggie becomes more zaftig. By the end of Love and Rockets: New Stories #4, two characters who started out looking kind of similar have each attained a drawn character that has a complex, yet discernible relationship to gender norms. Furthermore, each is iconic but not interchangeable. You and I might identify with Maggie and/or Hopey because of the iconic elements of the Hernandez' art, but we wouldn't confuse them with each other or with someone else because of his mastery of caricature.

At the end of the day, Y the Last Man is a fine comic in spite of issues I raise here, and Pia Guerra deserves her awards and nominations. The story is engaging and intellectually challenging. But Jaime Hernandez' Locas is something else, perhaps the zenith of the comics form, because Hernandez produces characters who are "iconic" in a different sense than the one McCloud uses. Maggie is "iconic" in the way she establishes a template, not in the way she follows one. With Fagin, Oliver Twist, Pip, and Miss. Havisham, Charles Dickens created types. He brought certain kinds of people into existence by distilling them, filling them up rather than emptying them. With Maggie and Hopey, Jaime Hernandez does the same. Works Cited Goldberg, Matt. "Todd Lincoln to Direct Danger Girl and Other Updates on the Project." http://collider.com/todd-lincoln-to-direct-danger-girl-and-other-updates-on-the-project/21705/. April 9, 2010. Accessed August 6, 2012. Hernandez, Jaime. Love and Rockets: New Stories #4. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2011. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: Harper, 1993. Vaughn, Brian K. (writer), Pia Guerra (pencils), Jose Marzan (inks). Y The Last Man. Issue #2. October 2002. Vertigo Vaughn, Brian K. (writer), Paul Chadwick (pencils), Jose Marzan (inks). Y The Last Man. Issue # 16. January 2004. Vertigo. "Žižek!: 2005 Documentary Reveals the “Academic Rock Star” and “Monster” of a Man." Open Culture. http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/zizek.html. June 18, 2012. Accessed August 6, 2012.

#78 A Graphixia Review of The Dark Knight Rises

admin — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 13:30:00 +0000

#89 Google, Freak Angels, Windsor McKay, and Mapping Comics

admin — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 22:01:10 +0000

I set out to write this post about the web comic Freak Angels, by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield. However, just as I was about to dive headlong into its construction, Google decided to celebrate the 107th anniversary publication of Windsor McKay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland. They did so by placing a “doodle” on the Google homepage that recontextualized McKay’s work within the Google moniker, a move they have become famous for by changing their header to reflect all manner of anniversaries, holidays and birthdays. Ellis and Duffield create a richly imagined post-apocolyptic steam-punk London in Freak Angels. There’s nothing particularly original about the story. It features a cast of characters with special powers—one of them being telepathy—who have managed to carve out a collaborative society in the post-apocolyptic version of a flooded London (specifically, Whitechapel). The main conflict arises from the pressure of external forces and from conflicts within the community. In fact, I wasn’t all that engaged with Freak Angels—it meanders a bit and there’s no consistent development—until I ran into the Google homepage: Google’s co-option of McKay’s work in order to make itself look clever and heighten its brand awareness might challenge its “do no evil” slogan, but it also got me thinking about how the web challenges the process of encountering and reading comics. For one, Google no doubt brought a good deal of attention to a significant comics innovator who has dropped out of the spotlight a bit. Also, by animating McKay’s signature style, Google brought McKay into line with the possibilities of html5. And, at the same time, the doodle suggests the possibilities for re-imagining the comic in a new presentational context (the Watchmen Motion Comic being another classic example). The reason I responded to the McKay “doodle” was also tied to my recognizing a rhyme between Duffield’s artwork in Freak Angels and McKay’s meticulously crafted panels. The rhyme of course launched Google again as I searched for images of McKay’s work on the web, found some and then moved on to an iPad app and a night of reading Windsor McKay instead of Freak Angels.

The point I’m labouring to come to is that web comics for the most part, Freak Angels is no exception, merely transcribe the materiality of comics onto the web. The web, it seems, is for most comic’s practitioners a place to experiment with longer formats, to get out of their element and, in Ellis’ case, to get out of the economic and commodity restrictions that mark the material world. What attracted me to the Google doodle was the way it re-imagined, rather than transcribed the medium. Casting aside the obvious issues of appropriation, etc., what Google’s doodle did, and I think this is what distinguishes the web comic from its material version, was to send me to other electronic versions of McKay’s work. Rather than turn me out toward the printed version, as Freak Angels does consistently in the right-hand margins of its web page, the Google doodle left me craving more re-animations, re-imaginings, and re-contextualizations on the web. It might all come down to mapping. How should comics map themselves on the web? Freak Angels unfolds in six “page” segments and offers a “visual archive” of each volume, allowing a reader to see the different segments of the comics. Freak Angels maps itself on the web in a completely different way than we encounter it in the material world. It strikes me that this might be the “pin” that web comics can drop: mapping the archive of their process; the creative process, the publication process, the narrative process. What Freak Angels and Google’s doodle do effectively is archive the comic while at the same time creating spaces for re-imagining, re-mixing, and re-encountering that archive.

#90 Canadian Identity in a Webcomic World: Hark, A Vagrant

Grayb — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 18:41:45 +0000

Fellow Graphixian Peter and I have been thinking a lot about the space for Canadian identity in the world of comics as we put together our paper for Comics Forum 2012 on Scott Pilgrim. (I won't spoiler it in case you're going to be there, but it involves Canadian identity. And Scott Pilgrim. How's that for a teaser trailer?) So with questions of national psyche weighing heavily on my mind, I jumped at the chance to talk about Kate Beaton's webcomic series Hark, A Vagrant for our webcomics theme this month. Because Kate Beaton is awesome. And Canadian. And often discusses Canadian awesomeness. In prepping for Comics Forum 2012, I read a really interesting article by Ryan Edwardson titled, “The Many Lives of Captain Canuck: Nationalism, Culture, and the Creation of a Canadian Comic Book Superhero.” In this article, Edwardson discusses the psychological importance of seeing Canadian identity represented in comics; in effect, he observes, comics remain “a cultural arena where New York overwhelms New Brunswick, and one rarely sees a maple leaf” (199). You know how excited the Canadian newsmedia gets when Canada is going to be featured on The Simpsons or the Canadian fan response to How I Met Your Mother once Robin Sparkles was unleashed?

"I went to Canada, and that's all I heard," said Alyson Hannigan, who stars as Lily. "Oh really?" Smulders said. "Yeah, but they were really happy about it," Hannigan said. "They were, like, 'We love you guys making fun of us.' " In a weird way, maybe at least some Canadians appreciate that "How I Met Your Mother" takes time to mock them. "It's almost like, 'Thanks for mentioning us!' " Smulders said. "People tend to forget about us."

Hurray for national low self-esteem! So when Canadian identity is discussed anywhere, but especially in any space not exclusively dominated by Canadians (so not curling rinks or Tim Hortons restaurants), we tend to take notice. Kate Beaton's Hark, a Vagrant comics are a unique blend of engaging line art, historical and cultural subjects, and wry humour. From a perspective of Canadian identity, Beaton's work is particularly compelling in that it places Canadian cultural references alongside major matters of global history. This juxtaposition allows for an equality of significance between the two while simultaneously creating an in-group of Canadians who understand the depth and range of references Beaton makes. A certain amount of insider information is required to make sense of many of the comics, thus creating an on-line community of national identity in a space, the internet, that is often conceived of as somehow post-national in scope. Take this Stan Rogers comic, for example: Stan Rogers was a folk singer originally from Ontario who made a career writing and singing about Atlantic Canada primarily but also Canadian working class history more generally. This comic requires knowledge of a very specific aspect of Eastern Canadian identity and national folk music culture to really work. Beaton doesn't footnote or frame this information; you either get the gag, or you don't. You're either part of the in-group for this comic, or you're not. What's significant about it is not merely its existence, although that is noteworthy, but its placement: Beaton posted this relatively obscure bit of Canadiana between comics on Mary Sidney and St. Francis, major figures of importance to Western culture and history writ large. Oh, Stan Rogers, if only you could have predicted. Telling Canadian stories has a place and a worthiness that Beaton seeks to explore. Note, for example, her comic about Stompin' Tom Connors: Beaton has Connors here asserting the legitimacy and necessity of a national cultural project, and she does so while enacting her own at the same time. Which is why she is totally bitchin', eh? Works Cited Edwardson, Ryan. “The Many Lives of Captain Canuck: Nationalism, Culture, and the Creation of a Canadian Comic Book Superhero.” The Journal of Popular Culture 37.2 (2003): 184-201.

#91 Webcomics and Authorship: Problematic fun in “Garfield minus Garfield”

smarsden — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 05:03:09 +0000

I have to admit, I’m not a big reader of webcomics – my interest has always centred on comics as material objects, collectible ephemera that I can organize alphabetically and numerically, hoarding in my custom made shelves as a physical archive of the shifting expression of cultural mores of Western society over the decades. This isn’t to say that I don’t think that webcomics have value; if anything, the opposite is true, as their content is not defined and limited by the constraints of publishing giants and the distinctive styles that are maintained by the Big Two. Success in webcomics is more based on advertising on individual sites, making the evolution of webcomics truly based on the merits of a singular author unrestrained by corporate values; as a result (and as we’ve seen this month from our other Graphixians) readers receive webcomics in which content defies conventional morality, language standards and what could typically be considered “good taste” in experimental pursuit of what consumers actually want to read. The level of experimentation also often flaunts traditional copyright laws, allowing for very interesting revisionings of other published works – my favorite of these has always been “Garfield minus Garfield,” a web series that interestingly creates its content by removing content from others’ work, problematizing the nature of authorship in fascinating ways. Currently one of the most popular webcomics on the net, this series could not have existed without its predecessor and interestingly has worked its way from print to web and back into print. “Garfield” itself needs little introduction – written by Jim Davis, it follows the adventures of a nerdy man named John Arbuckle and his always hungry, always abusive and cynical cat. In reading “Garfield,” you need to engage with the author’s suspension of reality and accept that Garfield is responding to his owner through thought balloons, though it’s always a little unclear as to whether or not Arbuckle can actually “hear” his counterpart. As a daily serial in newspapers throughout the world and having been translated into multiple languages, “Garfield” is one of comics’ greatest success stories, second likely only to Schultz’s “Peanuts” in terms of popularity. Having been published since 1978 and still running with no loss of readership, Garfield holds the title of the world’s most syndicated comic. Garfield has manifested in other media as well, having been a TV series, videogame and several films, both live action and cartoon. In these different versions however, the content has stayed the same. In Dan Walsh’s webcomic “Garfield minus Garfield,” however, the series takes on entirely new meaning with its new online forum. Most fanfiction, web or otherwise, works by adding new storylines to popular characters, developing unnoticed plot threads and taking characters in new directions. Walsh works fanfiction in the opposite direction, adding his perspective to the series by removing content from it. “Garfield minus Garfield” operates exactly like the title would suggest: Walsh scans and republishes Davis’ “Garfield” selected strips from the “Garfield” serial after having photoshopped out the eponymous cat. What remains is interestingly a different serial altogether that is far more tragic than it is comic – readers are left with Arbuckle having conversations entirely with himself and often simply staring off with no dialogue whatsoever. Instead of the funny, bitter banter between a man and his cat that we’re accustomed to, we find a potentially schizophrenic man in the midst of a constant existential crisis. Where Davis asks us to suspend our reality, Walsh brings us back to it: this is the real, awkward world of “Garfield,” consisting solely of a lonely man who has fictionalized sense of self. The rest of the comic is unaltered in any way, with Davis’ signature still on every strip that has migrated to Walsh’s page. This presents an interesting dilemma: who is really the author here? In moving Garfield to the web, Walsh has changed the readership. In removing Garfield, Walsh has dramatically changed the entire purpose and meaning of the comic. What’s left remains entirely Davis’ work, though through omissions and migration, this webcomic is a vastly altered serial that is certainly Walsh’s own. It’s perhaps more found poetry than it is fan fiction, though whose it actually “is” remains questionable. Beyond the content, however, “Garfield minus Garfield” has become so popular that it challenges our ideas of publication as well. Davis himself has commented on Walsh’s work, admitting that it’s an inspired revisioning of his original content and entirely unique from his own story. Further, the print publisher of the collected Garfield serials deemed “Garfield minus Garfield” so successful that it collected and offered a popular print version of Walsh’s serial as well, though with Davis noted as being the author and a simple foreword by Walsh. It’s as if publishing can’t make up its mind as to whose work is really whose, and – almost unfortunately - the relationship between Davis and Walsh is so amicable that a line in the sand was not necessary to decide the issue. From a broader perspective, “Garfield minus Garfield” is arguably a better series than the original Garfield – though it only carries any meaning whatsoever if one is familiar with Davis’ series. More importantly, because of the stringent nature of copyright, it would never have come into existence if not for the casual freedom that web publishing offers, and on the success of “Garfield minus Garfield,” further variations have arisen including the open source, user contributed “Square Root of minus Garfield” among others - one of the funniest and most compelling being "Garfield minus Garfield plus a Cat," replacing Garfield with a simple, realistic, unresponsive tabby. One could argue that most webcomics operate on this fundamental principle: these are comics that are often insistent on evolution through defying their originating print versions, drawing careful attention to the affordances of the medium in terms of both content and style. Whether this is manifest in reworking other authors’ images, popularizing what would in print normally be considered profane or exploding the traditional frame through what Scott McCloud calls the “infinite canvas” (a description of which is right here and worth reading), the current webcomics industry is populated by authors seeking to truly “make it new” and define themselves against-while-through the standards set by their forebears. Where success in the print medium of comics typically means getting hired by the big two and playing by their often formulaic rules, the generally self publishing world of webcomics demands a heightened sense of individual expression and experimentation, and if there is to be a further literary turn in comics, the web is likely where we’ll find it.

#92 Graphixia World Tour 2012

wilkinsp — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 21:18:50 +0000

Graphixia has come some distance since Peter and Dave began fooling around with a shared-writing project on Google Docs and Dropbox. We are approaching our 100th post and have no intention of slowing down.

Over the next three weeks, Graphixia will be adding a new dimension as we present two collaborative papers in two international conferences. Peter and Brenna will be presenting a paper entitled “An Innocent at Home: Scott Pilgrim and His Canadian Multicultural Contexts” at Comics Forum 2012 in Leeds, England on November 16. Comics Forum is associated with Thought Bubble a renowned festival of sequential art whose guests this year include Kate Beaton, Mark Waid, and Alison Bechdel. In addition to presenters from the UK, the conference will feature scholars from the United States, Canada, Romania, and Norway, to name a few countries.

The following week, on November 21, Peter and David will present a multi-media project entitled “Mapping Seth: Dominion City as Heritage District” at the International Conference on the Preservation of Heritage Districts at Beijing Union University. This conference will be something special, as we will be talking about comics in China before an audience of architects and heritage preservationists.

From its inception, Graphixia has been based on collaborative writing and a shared sense of building a new kind of academic discourse, focusing on comics but also exploring new platforms and modes of working that the 21st century affords. Consequently, our participation in these conferences represents a triumph of our approach for us, as we have transformed a “hobby” into a going academic concern. Our plan is to venture into larger scholarly publishing projects that will make Graphixia a centre for the academic discussion of comics in Canada.

Peter and Brenna will be video-blogging the Comics Forum conference from Leeds and Peter and David will do their best to do the same from Beijing, depending on internet restrictions. We hope to give you as much a sense of being there as possible, to see and hear how our presentations fit into the larger contexts of the conferences.

Speaking of video-blogging, this week marks our first use of Google Hangouts to record a video-podcast for Graphixia -see below for the embedded player. A reporter from Douglas College’s student newspaper, The Other Press will be on hand to ask questions and observe Graphixians in action as we mull over what we have written about and thought about since our last podcast. As long as the technology is forgiving, we should have it posted before the end of the week.

Finally, time is running out to submit a proposal to our conference: Comics and the Multimodal World. November 15 is the deadline. Originally, the conference was to run from June 6–9, 2012, but those dates turned out to conflict with those of other conferences in the area. We are now holding the conference the next week, from June 13–16. If you have an idea for a paper, seminar, or teach in, please submit it. We’d be delighted to see you.

#93 Mapping Seth: Dominion City as Heritage Site

admin — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 05:49:26 +0000

Presented at: The International Symposium on The Preservation and Renewal of Heritage Districts, Beijing China Nov. 20, 2012 Introduction: Two Dominions The work of Canadian comic book artist Seth raises theoretical questions about the nature of a heritage district. Beginning with a nostalgia for lost buildings and businesses in his early work, Seth ultimately creates a fictional 1950s Canadian town, Dominion City. We apply web tools to the comic book form to create a layered and interactive map of this imaginary place. This process has allowed us to reflect on the relationships between permanence and ephemerality, space and time, matter and spirit in heritage districts. When Seth builds Dominion out of cardboard, producing a fixed, material version of his world, he forsakes what makes the comics work: narrative. The cardboard version of Dominion ends up being an empty shell, disconnected from any particular story that would connect it to the past. This empty quality plagues all heritage districts that privilege permanence, space, and matter over transformation, temporality, and ephemera. Taking as our starting point an interrogation of the comics grid that structures the narratives of the medium, we argue that comics provide an ideal structure for the multiple iterations of urban spaces, animating essentially dead spaces that signify, rather than possess, heritage value. The structure of the comics page creates a relationship between space (the panels and drawings) and time (the sequence of those panels and drawings) that allows it to combine stasis and progress. Furthermore, this progress depends entirely on the viewer’s engagement to make it work. The viewer makes the grid function, animating the material it contains in a way that transcends the ephemerality and disposability of the comic book itself. This active construction of temporal layers of meaning out of static, yet ephemeral form allows us to imagine an interactive web space that treats Seth’s fictional heritage district like a real one to explore how it has similar creative concerns and pitfalls. Seth’s depiction of Dominion in both a two-dimensional comic book version and three-dimensional cardboard model allows us to investigate the contrast between the two representations. Where Seth’s cardboard Dominion reveals anxiety over our inability to preserve the urban environment in an ideal moment, against the rush of time, the comic book version of Dominion, and our web project’s appropriation of it, maps time onto space, allowing a continuity between past and present. Our web project takes the panels distributed across space and stacks them in layers so that the viewer can move through Dominion City and interact with how it changes over time, creating new narratives by manipulating the layers rather than merely observing an intact preservation. As a mode of “digital archaeology,” our project provides a method for allowing what architect Michael McClelland calls the “ghost functions” of urban spaces to circulate in the present. Background: Comics and Buildings in It’s a Good Life if You Don’t Weaken The first few issues of Seth’s serialized comic book Palookaville, which he started in 1991, present autobiographical stories of his youth. In issue #4 he begins a story arc, It’s a Good Life if You Don’t Weaken, that establishes his prominence as a graphic storyteller. It’s a Good Life also establishes urban and architectural heritage as a central theme in Seth’s work. Subsequently, narratives about characters as historians on quests for the recovery of something lost dominate his work. These characters attempt to sort out and represent the lost, intricate connections between the past and the present. In particular, the narrator or protagonist is often spurred by encounters with urban spaces or architecture. Early in It’s a Good Life, a fictional autobiography about a quest for a little known cartoonist, the narrator comes across an abandoned paint shop (Fig.1).

As he glances through the window, the narrative shifts from the degradation of the shop’s architectural details to a personal narrative about how he inherited “a sad sort of love” for particular comic strips “because they were passed on to me by my parents. ‘Nancy’ and ‘Andy Capp’ from my mother, ‘Little Nipper’ from my dad. These are the strips they enjoyed” (PV #5 14). For Seth, heritage means having the details, or ephemera—like “wood shelves, tile floors, tin ceilings”—connect us with our own personal histories, thereby preserving not just the substance but the spirit of the past. What makes Seth’s representation of heritage unique is that comics are themselves bound up in the preservation of these details in an ephemeral form. In the instance of the paint shop, Seth does not draw the interior architectural details so we feel their absence. The cartoon exterior of the shop acts as a kind of placeholder for them. If we can see them in our mind’s eye, triggered by the depiction of the exterior, then the transmission works. Otherwise, we hit the end of the line: everything the paint shop represents about the past dies. The exterior of the paint shop is a mnemonic trigger that calls forth memories of both an inherited taste in comics and the value of ephemeral architectural details for which this comic book image may be the only repository. Seth implies that comics can convey architectural heritage in the absence of the building itself. Cartoon representation provides a stripped down image that functions in two registers: that of the icon—the general outline of something that empties it of specifics and makes it easier to draw and reproduce—and that of caricature—the selection of recognizable details that allow viewers to quickly identify things and people. These iconic caricatures function associatively: from their details, we identify what they represent and imaginatively flesh them out; they are associative triggers that function like maps. “Actual” heritage districts tend to work in a similar way. We preserve identifying features of buildings and streets as we adapt them to the modern world. We look to see how the edifice triggers associations with past manifestations, intermingles with its immediate environment, and suggests the people who once inhabited it. Because buildings and urban spaces are subject to time and their use value to people’s evolving needs, tastes, and economic circumstances, preserving them in any authentic form is impossible. The only alternative is to create an archive of associative mnemonic triggers, for which the comic book, and the creative process that informs it, can be a model. Comics: Ephemera and Permanence/ Archives and Architecture The link between comics, historical archives, and architecture is common in the discussion of comic book form. The comics page is an architectural grid of compartments that holds text and images (Fig. 2).

The reader can approach the grid from a variety of perspectives and starting positions, which in turn generate a number of different lines of interpretation and layers of perception. As Chris Ware says, “[One way to look at comics] is to pull back and consider the composition all at once, as you would the façade of a building. You can look at a comic as you would look at a structure that you could turn around in your mind and see all sides of at once” (Raeburn 25). In short, the comics grid is, as Ware argues, as much like a building in its structure as it is like a page of conventional prose. But whereas buildings have some permanence, comics are ephemeral by nature. Historically the comic book has been produced on cheap paper to be read quickly and discarded. Jared Gardner argues that comic book artists use the ephemerality of the form ironically, to archive ephemerality in general: “[comics] are archives in the loosest, messiest sense of the word—archives of the forgotten artifacts and ephemera of American popular culture” (788). Astute comic book artists like Seth, Chris Ware,1 and Art Spiegelman2 have used comics as way to archive decaying or lost buildings: the ephemeral comic persists as the record of the supposedly permanent building. These artists invert the conventional relationship between ephemerality and permanence to make the point that even the most permanent of human constructions is ultimately ephemeral (Fig. 3).

Clyde Fans Dominion City first appears in Clyde Fans, a serialized story about a family business that produces electric fans. It appears in Palookaville immediately following It’s a Good Life if You Don’t Weaken. One of the story’s main characters, Simon Matchcard, exhibits the conflict between the fantasy of a past that can be substantially preserved versus the reality that it is ephemeral. For instance, Simon identifies himself with the physical structure of the apartment where he looked after his mother, imagining that it represents a material, permanent manifestation of his psyche. Furthermore, when he visits Dominion City on a failed sales trip, he fixes it in his mind as frozen in an ideal state, a changeless “eternal city” that again acts as a kind of defense against time and death. But when Simon returns to Dominion in a dream, we see the nightmarish aspect of this fantasy: the city he encounters is “stilled,” and empty. He remembers the buildings; it all looks “Big as life” (PV #19 72) but bereft of narrative, it is not Dominion City at all (Fig. 4).

In order to cope, Simon immediately identifies the city in the dream with one he has seen in his collection of postcards, which he has a hobby of collecting and archiving. This activity echoes the archival function of the comic book itself, as it is a way of giving meaning and value to what would otherwise be valueless. But while the comic book opens up what it archives to its audience, Simon’s collection of postcards is private and closed. It asserts his authority and control over material from the past. Thus, Simon’s archive of postcards represents the negative image of our web project. He archives not to share but to keep, control, and protect his psychic space. His collection functions like the apartment he shares with his mother as a fortress against time, decay, and, ultimately, other people. While he says, "Dominion...That name has a deep power over me. I can still feel that thread pulling between me and its places....The streets, the shops...the Bluebird Restaurant....I can still feel them sitting out there—unchanged, unmoved. Frozen" (PV #16 15), he still has power over it (Fig. 5).

We speculate that this moment is when Seth starts to imagine a three-dimensional cardboard version of Dominion as a way of preserving his imaginary city, giving it some material, substantive support. Simon Matchcard visits Dominion in 1957, towards the end of Seth's ideal Canadian decade. In Clyde Fans, which Seth has yet to complete, this idealization of Dominion appears ironic, associated with Simon’s delusional fantasy. But Seth’s work more and more identifies with this position and consequently his vision of Canadian heritage becomes more private and frozen and less engaged with the continuity between past, present and future. George Sprott Dominion City is the setting for George Sprott, a story, which first appeared in The New York Times Magazine as Seth was on hiatus from Clyde Fans and Palookaville. In this story, the imaginary city in fact contends with the title character for central focus. Three episodes tell the histories of buildings in Dominion, and show Seth using the lateral space of the comics grid to hold various phases of the building’s narrative. Our website converts what is laid out laterally and sequentially on the page into layers, with the present landscape on the top and a succession of “epochs” beneath it. Such cataloguing allows for alternative ways through the “lifespan” of a neighbourhood or architectural space according to the interests of the user. The virtual layering plays with the physical law that two objects cannot occupy the same space simultaneously. Consequently, the user can navigate through the layers of meaning and produce new narrative paths. The website asks the user to resist freezing the past in a particular moment by provoking numerous journeys across and through Dominion City in conjunction with Seth’s narrative about it. With a certain amount of irony, we take Seth’s “old-fashioned” notion that an archive necessarily collects things of the past and transposes them onto a paper grid--a spreadsheet, say, with boxes of verbal and visual information--and tweak it with contemporary technology to re-map it in a less despairing way. While Seth’s mode of representation always has a horizon of destruction, so that a building or neighborhood has a lifespan like a human being’s that ends in death, our tweaked comic book map sustains the past in the present and projects it into the future. Seth’s history of the The Melody Grill, George’s favourite restaurant, exemplifies this layering of a building’s story. Located “in the once-grand neighborhood of Lakeside—now a run-down commercial strip” (24), The Melody Grill began its existence in 1933 as Der Hirschsprung, a German restaurant (Fig. 6). But the arrival of the Second World War caused the owner to forsake that origin so as not to alienate patriotic Canadians. The transformation proves profitable as the Melody Grill becomes a successful local hotspot and remains one through the 1950s (Fig. 7). As the stars who frequent the place grow old and fade away, so does the Melody Grill: “Restaurants, too, have life spans. They die young or age gracefully or sink into neglect and decline” (24). However, to freeze the Melody Grill at the moment of its success in the name of preservation is ahistorical and dishonest; we need all the phases of a building’s life to appreciate its heritage. The Melody Grill has a third iteration as an inexpensive place where “local merchants, day laborers and tradesmen” go for lunch (24). Each of these three stages could represent its heritage value: its German origin, its heyday, and its destiny as a cheap local diner. Choosing one over the others to represent its true heritage value would be a matter of ideology and subjectivity. The comics grid offers is a way of mapping time onto space that preserves all three moments. As the narrative sequence moves through time, the images show the distinct phases of the building. The gutters, or spaces between the panels, allow us to disassemble the linear temporality of the normal reading sequence to rearrange the page as we look at it. Seth’s page takes the layers of history and distributes them across the grid so we can appreciate each one. This ability to scan the compartments of the page and move back and forth among them is important because it allows the viewer to see other relations besides strict temporal sequence. For example we can put the “cheap lunch” version of the Melody Grill next to the Der Hirschsprung version to see if we can find cultural connections between the restaurant’s German origin and its current function in the neighborhood. We can see how the different iterations of the space relate to each other. Like a road map, a comics page shows many routes and many possible destinations, each of which will have its own associations and connections. The amalgamation and archiving of these associations and connections creates a more complete and engaging picture of heritage than any particular iteration of a space frozen in time. Seth provides similar layers of history for The Radio Hotel and The Coronet Lecture Hall. In 1925 when it opened, the Radio was meant to be “ultra-modern—futuristic even” but “just 10 years later the name was terribly out of date. By the ’70s...it sounded positively prehistoric” (34). When the hotel joins the Marriott Chain, it loses its name and any specificity. The Coronet Lecture Hall, “Built in 1884 by local entrepreneur Thomas Lilley” is highly regarded as “Horn’s Vintage Halls of Canada (1993 edition) noted, ‘while in poor repair, it is still a magnificent building’” (43). But once its days as a lecture hall are done, the Coronet undergoes various iterations as blues hall, strip club and finally a dollar store. A “discount computer-sales outlet” replaces it, after it meets the wrecking ball. Seth’s problem with buildings in Canada is that they follow a trajectory of economic entropy. Unique and storied spaces devolve into banality governed by cash value. Seth sees the dollar store, the discount outlet, and the chain hotel as the nadir of this process.

Ultimately, this entropic movement of urban history undoes Seth’s attempts to hold onto the past in the comics grid. So, while Seth gives us the tools to map the pasts of buildings and districts, his fatalism about the present and the future prevents him from using those tools to tell anything but a sad tale (Fig. 8). Dominion City This fatalism about the destiny of urban space leads Seth to exchange temporality for space and matter when he creates the cardboard version of Dominion, apparently giving up on narrative altogether. In an interview with Kathleen Dunley in The Comics Grid, Seth says, “I have a feeling that if it’s not the next book, it’s coming soon, where it’s just going to be a book about Dominion and have no plot whatsoever” (Comics Grid). Once he moves out of the realm of narrative, Seth loses the multiple iterations of space and freezes Dominion in his ideal 1950s form:

Seth tells how he came to construct Dominion out of cardboard in Palookaville #20. He imagined using Dominion as the setting for five cartoon short stories, and began sketching and describing buildings of the town a ledger book: “But where do you start when dreaming up an entire city? That’s a big task. The easiest answer seemed to be to begin with a single building” (PV #20 42). The model-making at first seemed a diversion that allowed Seth to meditate on the buildings while constructing them so that he would be better able to imagine stories to go with them. But the stories never materialized. Making the buildings instead of drawing them in a sequence of panels turns Dominion into a much more private space, over which Seth exercises godlike control: “Dominion turned out to be an idealized place. A quintessentially small Canadian city—old and faded—in decline even—but idealized in that it contained nothing that I didn’t desire to be there” (PV #20 42). Dominion allows him the opportunity to counteract the destruction of buildings and businesses that he documents in his other work: “I was collecting buildings—putting them in amber—saving them from the wrecking ball” (PV #20 44). Because Seth is working with a private world of his own creation, not operating in the real world, he can do what he likes. The problem for the actual preservationist who tries to wrest spatial permanence out of temporal flow is that he or she is working in the real world. When we look at the Melody Grill in the cardboard construction of Dominion, we wonder what happened to all the other stories, the other occupations of that space, that putting this version in amber has erased. It is worth noting that putting something in amber to protect it also makes it unusable. With his cardboard constructions Seth shows the subjective dimension of what counts as important for heritage. But the heritage of actual urban spaces is intersubjective in its meaning. We can’t say that they contain nothing that we don’t want to be there. This intersubjectivity reintroduces the temporal element. Your story and my story and that of everybody else who has passed through this place counts, and those stories are not frozen in time. The true heritage site is collaborative, not private. Our web model of Dominion shows the potential to collect the memories and fantasies of the people who have something invested in urban buildings and spaces. Rather than putting one iteration of a space in amber—effectively killing it to preserve it—our comic book virtual archaeology allows for many iterations and narratives. In this model, the buildings in a space would be less important than these iterations and narratives. To use the case of the Melody Grill, someone would say, “I remember it as a German restaurant” while someone else would say, “I remember it as a socialite hotspot.” And a third person would say it was a just a place in the neighborhood where workers could get a cheap lunch. These contested versions of the space would give it meaning, and the map would allow us to see these different layers without necessarily privileging any of them. Although we critique Seth’s cardboard buildings, his impulse for building them reflects a powerful urge for anyone invested in heritage preservation: the desire for a material mnemonic trigger, something that one can see and touch rather than just read or hear about. For Seth, the materiality of this trigger is more important than accuracy. He writes that the buildings “are not to any scale, and the scale between buildings varies wildly” (PV #20 54). But, in spite of the models’ imaginariness and inconsistency, they invoke the metaphorical exchange of matter for spirit: “Somehow the homey materials manage to transmit some of the qualities of age and neglect that I find so appealing out in the real urban landscape” (PV #20 54). “Homey materials” is a curious expression because it means familiar, close to home: heimlich, as the Germans would say. But, as Freud argues, the heimlich and the unheimlich, or uncanny, are closely linked. And the cardboard buildings trigger the uncanny moment, as buildings from an imaginary town no one has ever seen or been to assume the status of heritage site. This uncanny feeling is perhaps what we seek from heritage sites: we want that which we feel ought to be familiar but in fact is long dead to return to life amid the modern city. Consider the way Michael McClelland talks about the revived heritage Distillery District in Toronto:

It is the heritage buildings which bring a sense of otherness—in their texture, smell and feel. The original purposefulness of the malt houses, cooperages and fermenting cellars has faded into a palimpsest of ghost functions lying beneath the current operations of the site. (24)

The problem of the heritage site is a quasi-religious one: people fear they require a material connection to the “ghost functions” of the past, or they will disappear and we will lose our uncanny connection with them. While some would argue that we need to preserve the authentic buildings and spaces of the past itself in order to have a genuine heritage experience, we argue the opposite. The more we neglect the temporal dimension of heritage to focus on materiality in space the less likely the ghost functions of the past are to appear. Instead of the dynamic, layered narrative of the comic book, we get the cardboard shell “preserved in amber.” By manipulating Seth’s comics through fairly simple web modeling, we hope to show a way of engaging with the ghost functions of the past through imaginative endeavour that allows them to circulate in the present, a way in which the ever-transforming digital archive of ephemera replaces the fixed materiality of building or urban space as the key to heritage preservation. Works Cited Dunley, Kathleen. “Seth: Memory, Reclamation and World Building.” The Comics Grid. 24 July 2012. Web. 10 Oct. 2012. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny” Art and Literature. The Freud Penguin Library, Volume14. Trans. James Strachey. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. 335-376. Glass, Ira, Tim Samuelson, Chris Ware. Lost Buildings. Chicago: WBEZ and National Public Radio, 2003. McClelland, Michael. "Learning From The Distillery District." Canadian Architect 50.2 (2005): 20- 24. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 Aug. 2012. Raeburn, Daniel. Chris Ware. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Seth. George Sprott: 1894-1975. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2009. -----. It’s a Good Life if You Don’t Weaken. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly. 2003. -----. “Clyde Fans.” Palookaville #16 (2002), Drawn and Quarterly. Montreal. -----. “Clyde Fans.” Palookaville #19. (2008) Drawn and Quarterly. Montreal. -----. Palookaville #20. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2012. Spiegelman, Art. In the Shadow of No Towers. New York: Pantheon, 2004. Ware, Chris. Building Stories. New York: Pantheon, 2012.

#94 Graphixia Videoblogs Comics Forum 2012

Grayb — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 03:48:29 +0000

[youtube_video id="QJbaJ9gePMc"] Peter Wilkins and I had the most marvellous time at Comics Forum 2012 this year. I've put together a videoblog of some interviews and chats we had in and around the Central Library in Leeds. I think the video makes it clear what a fun, engaging, thoughtful, and compelling conference it was. It also probably makes it clear that I am not that awesome at video editing. Some things that may not come clear from the video:

I took a bunch of video of panels but the sound was unusable. If I videoed your panel and chatted with you about it but it's not here, it's not for any reason other than that I am kind of a terrible camera person.
Simon Grennan is, without fear of exaggeration, the most dapper human being who is not in a Bond movie.
Hattie Kennedy is a delight and might be my academic soul sister. And we have the same favourite Anne of Green Gables novel (House of Dreams, obviously).
It doesn't take much to get me to hold court about the deep and lasting intellectual impact of Fraggle Rock.
The organizers of Comics Forum 2012, Ian Hague and Carolene Ayaka, are amazing and they really worked hard to put together a hell of a conference. The volunteers who kept the lights on were also universally helpful and kind.
I have no video clip of linguist Frank Bramlett of the University of Nebraska, and I have no idea why not. I declared him my Favourite Person of the Conference. You can check out his edited collection, Linguistics and the Study of Comics (2012), to see his levels of awesome.
Every conference should have an award for Best Canadian Paper, and Peter Wilkins and I should win it.

Thanks to Peter for doing all the talking and letting me remain comfortably behind the camera. And if I'm not at Comics Forum 2013, I will totally want to punch myself in the face.

#95 "Lest we Forget": Affect in Translation in Tardi's "C'etait la Guerre des Tranchees"

smarsden — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 07:50:29 +0000

It’s international month at Graphixia, where we’re recognizing comics from outside of North America – highly appropriate, given that three of our number have just completed a whistlestop world tour bringing Canadian content abroad through the graphic narrative conference circuit. As it’s also Remembrance month, I wanted to turn to Jacques Tardi’s C’etait la Guerre des Tranchees, originally published over a twelve year span in A Suivre and Le Trous d’Obus in France, which thankfully has been translated for a North American audience by Fantagraphics Books as It was the War of the Trenches. This haunting, often disturbing exploration of the first World War based on primary source texts, personal family narratives and photorealistic translations of violent images and the scenery of the war is entirely delivered from the French perspective – a take on the war that history students in the West are often quite ignorant of, having been inundated with the dominant accounts propagated by its own national rhetoric. Seeing Tardi’s portrayal of the horrors of trench warfare and his vision of the random senselessness and brutality that accompanies it reminds us to reflect on our (mis)conceptions of history, drawing attention to the fractal realities that are embedded in events that have been experienced internationally. A meticulous, detailed and factual reading of WWI, War of the Trenches is based on recounting research conducted on primary accounts of the war from soldiers’ perspectives, which are frequently unsettling because of how banal they are – Tardi presents war as a state of confusion, a fact that he displays in his visceral imagery of aimless soldiers, often left alone in a state of permanent but curiously mundane existential crisis. Oscillating between devastated landscapes and close-ups of soldiers faces, these images have largely been transcribed from photographic representations of those who actually fought in the war (compiled by his archivist Jean-Pierre Verney), adding an emotional depth through a layer of affect that highlights the strengths of the medium and which simple textual retellings of the war cannot help but fail to achieve. Tardi emphasizes this by eschewing the traditional, nationalized approach to WWI literature, showcasing the hesitant, unconvinced nature of the troops – vignettes of soldiers shot by their own side for desertion and refusal to follow orders, and those marched knowingly to their deaths because of disaffected, shell-shocked leadership dominate the text. In this sense, War of the Trenches borders on the seditious, intent on defying any attempts to present the war as rational or moral. Tardi defies traditional narrative structure as well, avoiding protagonists that would allow you a character to root for; in his own words, War of the Trenches is “a non-chronological sequence of situations, lived by men who have been jerked around and dragged through the mud … There are no ‘heroes,’ there is no ‘protagonist’ in this awful collective ‘adventure’ that is war. Nothing but a gigantic, anonymous scream of agony.” (i). There is little dialogue to the story, as Tardi is most often outside looking in on these events, narrating while visually depicting the atrocities that occurred in the trenches. He also brings to light the nationalist fervor in Paris that accompanied the onset of war, with an elderly abstainer, refusing to be caught up in the revelry, beaten to death by a mob of citizens for presumably being a spy or a traitor. Similar scenes of violence abound in the text, most notably when a squad of Germans uses Belgian women and children as shields, and whom the French soldiers shoot down anyways. The graphic novel takes on a highly personal tone at the midpoint of the text as the reader is offered the stories told by Tardi’s grandfather, himself a participant in the war. Shifting to a first person account and pulling no punches, Tardi introduces this section by describing his grandfather’s experience of sleeping in a trench in what he thought was mud, his hands actually having been buried in the entrails of a fallen soldier. Meant to shock and disgust, graphic narrative here provides a means of allowing the reader an entrypoint into the war that is otherwise attainable only through film – implicit in Tardi’s work is how much more effective accounts of genocide are if accomplished through a medium that marries primary, textual accounts with similarly primary visual representations. Here, there is no glamour or nationalism in his approach, and it’s appropriate that Tardi recounts underused stories of confusion and chaos through the similarly underused graphic narrative for the relating of historical documents; both form and content assert themselves with an insistence that is seemingly self-conscious throughout the novel. Even though this is a text based on translation of these events to the page, it feels far closer to reality than the propagandized historical materials offered by the typical academic publishing industry and so many ministries and agencies that have long become entrenched in our collective national psyche – more real, even, than purely textual autobiographical accounts. The visual, in historical documents, brings the reader closer to what Raymond Williams notes as the “structure of feeling,” being the ultimately unattainable cultural experience of a particular moment in history, with all of the emotional context that attends it. It is in the blank stares and confused expressions of the real French soldiers and citizens whom Tardi portrays that we see a reflection of what this unimaginable loss of human life can do to the spirit, as we’re shown limbless bodies and rotten corpses as casually as the soldiers themselves were exposed to in the trenches. There is a level of authenticity to the text that is simultaneously illuminating and, frankly, alarming. Tardi writes that “the only thing that interests me is man and his suffering, and it fills me with rage” (i) – this rage is perfectly and terrifyingly transcribed in It was the War of the Trenches, adding depth and urgency to our worn out aphorism “Lest we Forget.” Works Cited Tardi, Jacques. It was the War of the Trenches. Trans. Kim Thompson. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2011.

#96 Human Geography: Oliver East's Trains Are...Mint

wilkinsp — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 23:51:31 +0000

One of my aims for my latest trip to the UK was to pick up a copy of Oliver East’s Trains Are…Mint, which came out in 2008. I thought I would pick it up from Gosh! Comics in London on my way to China to talk about Seth (I get a kick out of writing sentences that make me sound like a habitual globetrotter). But I didn’t have to wait that long because Oliver had a table at Thought Bubble in Leeds when I visited the convention on November 17. Oliver kindly signed my copy and made me a drawing. I had to leave his table and come back because his pencil kept breaking. It was funny at the time, but it became funnier when I read Trains because his pens keep running out in the book. My first reading of Trains gave rise to a question that I normally find tiresome: is this comics? Trains poses this question in a good way. While every now and then a grid structures the page, as often as not each page is a single image with notes. Labels on tins, signs in windows, and graffiti function slyly as text boxes. And the colours are as nice as anything in Brecht Evans’ work. Nevertheless, as you look at Trains, you can’t help thinking “this is miles away from Spider-Man.” But it’s also miles away from Chris Ware and Jaime Hernandez. So what is Trains Are…Mint? The conceit of the book is Oliver walking from Manchester to Blackpool, taking pictures and writing notes. The book reports on the journey as a low-key, quotidian travelogue; at the end of each day he goes home again, starting the next morning where he left off. East never rationalizes his project. He doesn’t explain what he’s doing or why he’s doing it. The book simply begins with the opening stages of the walk. At times it looks like he is collecting graffiti, at others like he is reflecting on train stations. The mystery surrounding the motivation of Trains makes the book work, as do the glimpses of Oliver’s life outside of walking: his job and his relationships all appear fleetingly, gestures towards an autobiographical comic that could be but isn’t. We wonder how all this wandering, map work, and observation connects to that life. What sort of allegory is this? What’s being repressed? We know he has a partner, a child, a job that has something to do with a club. We know that he likes football. But we acquire this knowledge almost by accident, as East focuses our attention on train stations and landscapes. The predominant mood of the images is one of solitude. East’s isolation as he wanders the train tracks is palpable and sometimes unsettling, like Carey Grant in the middle of a cornfield in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. The real focus is the walking, the journey, the destination, and how to get back. Whenever Oliver goes off map, there’s the danger of getting lost, losing the thread, coming off track. What does it mean to get lost in the 21st Century landscape of northern England? Is it possible to be alone in such a place? In fact, the spaces East depicts are curiously empty, and whenever other people appear in Trains Are…Mint anxiety ensues because they introduce potential conflict as they interrupt the solitary walk. For instance, when we see people for the first time, the potential for violence looms: “I walk past a man shouting at the men re-laying the road and carry on past the Roman fort” (13). Solitary paths hold the potential for threat: “Short stubby bushes look like rapists. Big, bushy bushes look like murder domes” (51). And “Old ladies and their dogs look menacing in the early morning” (30). Nothing bad ever happens except in East’s imagination. He daydreams about stumbling on the dead body of a girl, for instance. And on one rather startling page, East himself becomes the imaginary threatening figure to a woman out for a run. These are the moments that charge up Trains Are…Mint Paul Gravett’s blurb on the cover claims for Trains a curious literary allegience: “On the Road Becomes On the Tracks.” But that equation is somewhat misleading. For one thing, there are more actual trains in On the Road, and, for another, there is no “burn, burn, burn” energy in Trains, nor any of the grand generational allegory, just a contemplative, though somewhat anxious, quiet. So why would we be interested in such an apparently modest undertaking? At this point, the comics critic in me wants to step in to say that the watercolour washed drawings are fantastic, worth the price of admission alone. While this is true, I don’t think it explains the greatness of Trains Are…Mint. That lies in the way that East links psychological reflection to physical action in a way that contrasts with Kerouac’s urgency. What catalyst for aesthetic and scientific discovery can match the simple walk? As James Joyce taught us with Ulysses a walk around the city that ends with a return home has an epic resonance. Oliver East’s venturing out towards Blackpool, getting a little further each day and always returning home at night, sets romantic adventure against domestic security. Threats and obstacles exist largely in the mind and imagination, as they do for most literature, but East’s engagement with them is as valid as any dragon slaying. In a few places, East talks about how his A to Z fails him. While these are anxious moments, they are also epiphanic ones: the only reason to go on a physical or psychological journey is to find some place off the map or outside the apparently encyclopedic totality of what we know. Works Cited East, Oliver. Trains Are...Mint. London: Blank Slate, 2008

#97 The Scene

admin — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 07:05:31 +0000

This post is about scenes. Comics are all about scenes. I also think they get us thinking about what actually makes up a scene. If a scene is, straight up, a space where any event, real or imagined, takes place; it is also, as on stage, part of the play that constitutes a unit of development—a fragment or part of something. At the same time as the scene governs the formal space of the story, it is also a term we use to identify a socio-cultural phenomena in which a cluster of like-mindedness can be located geographically or, at the very least, philosophically. Comics, like music, have their “scenes” — the West coast independent movement in the 1960s and 70s with Crumb, Pekar and the like; the New York School of Eisner and Speigelman, on and on it goes. I’m quite certain that many other than I could delve into the intricacies of the different comic’s scenes. What I think deserves attention is how these geographic or philosophical like-mindedness pervades the creative space of comics. How its scenes are intensely open. Looking at Kevin Huizenga’s Gloriana for instance suggests that the scene in comics can borrow both from the vastness and spacial play that seems so prevalent in comics and from the multiplicity of perspective available to the formal construction of literature and film. It would be to simple to say that Huizenga captures the scene from every angle, but he gives it a shot. In so doing, he raises to our nose the concept of the scene and how the conglomeration of images leads to a kind of shared philosophy or guiding principle—it’s style by association in the same way that every band from Seattle in the 1990s was “grunge.” However, on the level of story, Huizenga makes us think about the role of the scene and one’s perspective of it. The comic is at once clustered and frantic; empty and calm. It moves through pure abstraction

to a deeply emotional signification of emptiness. The result is a discordance between scenes that suggests a common inner conflict about how we perceive and represent out environment—our geography, if you like. Metaphorically, it suggests something too about the socio-cultural scenes I noted above—that they are at one point frantic, full of catalysts and scattered ideas and in another instant they are devoid, empty, over. Suffice to say, these scenes tell us a lot about the human experience and harken back to a primal sense of community. Yet despite all this, comic artists still seem somehow bounded by the guttered layout that forces scenes into fragments. It’s as if comics somehow need to represent parts of a scene rather than the scene itself. Or, maybe comics show us that, however tangentially, the scene is its parts. Margaux Motin, whose yearning to be an anthropologist seems oddly appropriate to this post, both abandons and uses the guttered space in her scenes.

The franticness is far from Huizenga’s black and white abstractions. The authors are clearly of two different scenes. That said, as readers we encounter the page in both instances as a scene, at once in parts and whole. We cannot help ourselves from pulling these scenes forward.

Margaux’s pages take on the fading characteristics of the pages that came before it—both in her book and in the work of others as influence. The scene when put in this context seems endless; comics are but a series of ever-fading palimpsests continually paralleling and layering scenes. Turning to artists like Chris Ware and Seth, the scene becomes a space for another kind of juxtaposition. The scene for them is always intricate, always building fragments into something bigger more tangible. It’s pretty straightforward I’m afraid—not much for me to qualify. But what does it suggest about the way comics enact the scene? The scene for comics is different than for other genres—its static, but implies motion, temporal movement; its impression is immediate (as the viewer’s eyes meet the page), but its intricacies linger and impress further as we scan.

At the same time, the socio-cultural scene of comics is also responsive to its history (both as a source of angst and of admiration), it has geographical locales, all of which have their own meritocracy depending on who in the community you happen to be talking to. There are current scenes in Seattle (Fantagraphics) and Montreal (Drawn & Quarterly) that tend toward independence from the large New York / West Coast houses, catering to the “exclusive crowd.” Suffice to say, those who like and admire comics are part of a scene that is about making scenes (with a pen / pencil). It’s worth thinking about how the collective consciousness of these scenes infect the materiality of the scene—what it produces, how it dies, and how it lingers both as static entity and evolving form. In the beginning, we did not strive to preserve our language. Rather, we painted the perceptions of our world and its existence in a scene that locked our fragments in the association of images on the cave wall. Works Cited: Huizenga, Kevin. Gloriana. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2012. Margaux Motin. But I Really Wanted to be an Anthropologist. SelfMadeHero, 2012. Seth. George Sprott: (1894-1975). Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2012. Ware, Chris. Acme Novelty Library. 2008.

#98 Notes Towards a Philosophy of Teaching Comics

Grayb — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 20:07:57 +0000

While some of us have the privilege of teaching graphic narrative courses or within graphic studies departments and programs, many of us try to work graphic narratives into existing disciplines and departments -- English, sociology, linguistics, history, science -- of varying levels of conservativeness. The worthy space for discussing comic books is well-established for those of us who would seek out a blog like this one, but many of us interact day-to-day with colleagues for whom this worth is either questionable or outright rejected. Having spent much of my fall semester engaging in these kinds of debates in my own workplace, I found that my Christmas break thoughts were consumed by determining the goals and intentions of my own work with graphic texts and students. My own perspective was once quite naive on the whole topic. It never occurred to me that the value or relevancy of comics was up for debate. As an MA student, I TA'd a standard first year English course that included Morrison and Quitely's WE3. My PhD course work in Digital Humanities brought me frequently into contact with comics folks who seemed content and largely settled in their work. As a fledgling instructor, no one blinked when I taught comics alongside novels and poetry in my classes. And when I was finishing my PhD, I went out on the job circuit with a lecture on Chester Brown's LOUIS RIEL. So when I started to encounter resistance to using comics in a teaching and learning context, I was really confused at first. And because it has always been a part of my academic environment, I didn't have the vocabulary to discuss why I think graphic texts belong in an undergraduate English education. When an idea has never been challenged, sometimes we lack the discussion points to make a case for what we do. So I've spent the last few weeks trying to think with intentionality about why I believe in the value of comics in the world of literary studies. 1. The definition of literacy is shifting. I see very few English majors in the student body I teach, so I always think of my job as being the person who will teach them how to read the world effectively. I really feel I would be startlingly remiss in this goal if I didn't talk to them about visual literacy. I can teach them rhetorical strategies in text, and I do, but if we don't talk about how image can ironize or undercut or trouble these messages -- something comics demonstrate really well! -- then I haven't equipped them to critically consumer product or political advertising or the varying levels of political bias on news networks. We also seem to make this weird assumptions that are students are visually literate. Why do we assume this? Where do we perceive they are learning this? Are they absorbing this knowledge by osmosis? We would never ever assume that students learn to read critically by just living in a world with text. Why do we make this assumption about visual imagery? 2. Comics look readily accessible on the surface but take extensive cognitive work to engage with fully. This is the biggest stumbling block I find with colleagues who have never tried teaching graphic content to students, and it ties in to the assumption above that students somehow just know how to engage with visual texts. Students may delight at first seeing graphic novels on an English course (though I really believe this comes primarily from a desire just to see something different in any form), but they actually tend to get anxious about it in my experience, especially if they are not comic readers. If you ever want to be comforted that text isn't dead (I don't know why that would be a comfort to you, but imagining it would be for a moment), watch students engage with a graphic novel for the first time. They cling to the text! They want a straightforward narrative! They balk at analyzing the visual world of the book! We all know that comics are equal parts pleasure and cognitive work (ok, sometimes not equal!). It takes students longer to work through a graphic text, especially the first time, than it does for them to work through a comparable-length text in a genre they are familiar with. They're doing two things at once: reading the prose, and learning to read the visual signifiers. It's hard work to train oneself not to automatically privilege the text, and it's excellent cognitive work to develop those skills in our students. 3. Comics prepare students well for all types of literary studies. At the first year level, are we really doing much more than preparing students to read texts attentively? If our focus is on attentive reading and dealing with metaphor, imagery, allusion, and all those other fun devices, is there any good reason not to do that within a mixture of genres? I guess what I have a hard time understanding is how it harms a student's education to expose them to graphic texts in a literary context. If the argument is simply one of textual supremacy -- that the number of words on the page matters above all else -- then I don't even know how to engage with that point-of-view as it strikes me as so basically valueless. Surely the study of literature is something more; is Atwood's "You Fit Into Me" a lesser poem because it is only four lines? Are Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience lesser individually because their illustrations add so much? I don't know how anyone would argue yes to both those things, and yet number of words on the page is an actual argument I've faced in attempting to use graphic novels in the classroom. I'm very much in the working stages of really developing an intentionality around my desire to teach comics in a literary setting, and I'd love this post to foster conversation around these and any other issues related to graphic novels in the world of more conservative disciplines and departments. Please leave your ideas in the comments, if you would.

#99 Vanishing Points: Perspective in Jason Lutes’ “Berlin: City of Stones”

smarsden — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 20:46:11 +0000

A few months back at Graphixia when pondering over potential topics for consideration, Dave brought up an excellent suggestion in a text that I’d only heard about before in passing: Jason Lutes’ “Berlin,” which is still currently being published in serial form by Drawn and Quarterly. Two collections are available now, “City of Stones” and “City of Smoke,” with a third and final volume to follow once the next eight issues have seen print. Given its historical bent, Berlin makes for a useful follow-up to my most recent post on Tardi’s “C’etait La Guerre Des Tranchees” as it chronicles the events leading up to the Second World War, set against a backdrop of social strife and change as narrated primarily by the fictional Kurt Severing, a lonely journalist, and Marthe Muller, an aspiring artist seeking a modern education in the big city. As a history major with a focus on WWII, I’ve long been fascinated with the period in terms of the very clearly delineated portrayal of good and evil that we find in our texts – given the easy iconography of a war that was insistent on symbols, one would think historical accounts would lend themselves to graphic narrative, though these are few and far between. Lutes, however, does not take this easy way out in recounting the war; rather, he focuses on the much more challenging retelling of the city’s slow transition to fascism through the cultural nuances of the period a few years prior to the war. The first volume concentrates far more on the Communist leanings of the period and delves into the personal narratives of multiple characters’ experience of the period. Despite the uneasy undercurrent of war throughout the narrative and an elucidation of the cultural values that swayed German society at the tail end of the Weimar Republic, Berlin is far more about perspective in history, storytelling and in art. The title of the first volume, “City of Stones,” comes from the end of the third chapter, as Severing describes the futility of those who would write history into existence in a veritable sea of voices all attempting the same purpose. Living in the “newspaper district,” Severing can hear the journalists and novelists out his window clacking at their keys, attempting to channel the fragmented present into print for their own purposes. He imagines each of these pages as stones, each tossed into the river of human memory, disrupting the flow until all that is left is a marsh of experience that is, he implies, meaningless and shallow in its record because of its now diffuse nature. One is reminded of Plato’s Phaedrus and writing as a means of forgetting – we are, at times, so inundated with stories that we become immune to their significance, divorced as they are from the personalities of their authors and by the emotional and personal context surrounding their emergence. Once chronicled, they become a sea of voices that bog down any ability for us to comprehend any verity of an event. This rumination encapsulates Berlin’s frustration with history, as Lutes is not intent on delivering a clearly defined series of events that must have led to the predictable, inevitable outcome of tyranny and war; instead, we are presented with personal, disconnected lives that attempt to capture a larger cultural moment without judgment or bias. These various disjointed subplots that run throughout Berlin allow Lutes to channel this metaphoric river for the purposes of a more truthful, human understanding of the interwar period; as Severing puts it, “if each stone is placed carefully and with purpose, perhaps something can be built. Not to dam the current, but to divert it” (Lutes 80). These stories, though fiction, accomplish exactly this: Lutes condenses the diversity of cultural experience paradoxically through his singular encapsulation of disparate voices. In its multifaceted account, “Berlin” is reminiscent of Isherwood’s 1939 “Berlin Stories” (later to become “Cabaret”) which attempted much the same feat. Lutes, however, changes the dynamic by capitalizing on the graphic form of delivery as not simply a medium, but a motif in explaining the shaping nature of perspective on our understanding of history and storytelling. Marthe, going to art school in Berlin, attends a lecture on perspective in modern art and the instructor’s privileging of exact realism through the application of scientific methods in relation to accurately depicting objects. The instructor, Schenk, concentrates on the vanishing point on the horizon, directing students to a window and asking them to imagine it as a framed picture (which is interestingly, in this context, exactly what it is – framed once by the window and then again by the comics’ panel). He highlights the fact that based on one’s perspective, the point at which objects disappear, and later at which they appear, is entirely dependent on the viewer. In relation to the narrative, Lutes subtly implies the limitations of singular vision, a fact reiterated in the following panel depicting a woodcut by Albrecht Durer. Here, the cold image highlighting the scientific perspective applied to art appears ironically far less realistic and engaging precisely because of its attempts at realism, juxtaposed with the vibrant characterization and clean lines of Lutes’ own, more comic drawings. The students, debating after class, similarly point out the flaws in a system that privileges this sanitized, exact approach to rationalizing the world. Marthe states “it’s flawed on the face of it. If I understand this ‘appearing point’ idea correctly, it presumes a one-eyed view of the world. Which reduces the effect of reality by half. Or one third, if we’re talking about dimensions” (Lutes 104). The subtext of this scene returns us to the import of understanding the world through multiple perspectives seen at once, in one context and in a way that is human because of its multiplicity. These perspectives, or again the stones carefully placed, allow us a more holistic understanding of both past and present, an important component of "Berlin" consistently emphasized by the recurring debates between its characters and the construction of the images that shift depending on which protagonist dominates the scene. What the reader is presented with is a work of historical fiction that, while offering a stable backdrop of chronological events, creates a parallax view which suggests any singular account of history, understood without the nuanced perceptions of the often irrational, emotional and altogether human experiences of the moment is shortsighted, limiting and even potentially dangerous. Near the end of the first volume, we see each of the significant characters we’ve followed laying in their respective beds on the eve of May 1^st 1929, the Worker’s Day riots, each about to experience a significant cultural moment in different ways, with each perspective no less “real” a historical understanding of the moment than the next. Berlin is, at its core, an acknowledgement that to understand history is to recognize the authenticity of varied perspectives, with each vanishing or appearing point legitimate even if it exists in conflict with another. Work Cited Lutes, Jason. Berlin: City of Stones. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2001. Print.

#100 Standing in Relation to Comics: A Special 100th Post

admin — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 05:29:34 +0000

This post is a truly collaborative effort to mark our 100th post and introduce readers to a few new contributors. We're each reflecting upon where we stand in relation to comics and, of course, doing a little reminiscing about our experiences with Graphixia. Thanks for reading Graphixia! Peter Wilkins: My big question for my relationship to comics emerges as a questioning of the usefulness and interestingness of my literary background in relation to comics criticism: what about the visual array? By this question, I don’t mean only “what about the pictures?” because they are but one of the features that distinguishes comics from prose literature, one of the ways that comics makes the eye work the page differently than prose. And yet “narrative” and “storytelling” remain the dominant terms in the critical discourse on comics, with occasional nods to page structure, panel shape, and artist’s line. A corollary of this issue is that writers perhaps get too much credit. While the divide between writer and artist on the one hand makes comics a collaborative art form, on the other hand, it continues the privilege on verbal concept over the visual expression of that concept, even if the writer has something to do with how the page looks. But, if we celebrate comics written and drawn by a single person, we may be retreating to a romantic notion of authorship and creativity that is problematic. Still, if you think about it, the usually clearly demarcated division of labour between the writer and the artist, perpetuates those notions as well. Maybe we need to see more comics where the line between writer and artist is more blurry. I want to think about comics using more precise terms and concepts, that apply more specifically to comics and less to narrative in general. Meanwhile, cognitive psychologist and comics enthusiast Neil Cohn has been conducting research that shows that the brain processes comics in the same way as it processes written sentences. Comics, it turns out, have a grammar after all, and “visual grammar” is similar to verbal grammar. Cohn’s research appears to confirm Scott McCloud’s theory of sequentiality in Understanding Comics. OK, so reading comics as we read prose appears to be the “natural” way to read comics. But that way is not the only way, and learning to “look at” and “see” comics is as important as learning to “read” them. To do so requires a willful derangement of all the perceptions. I know I’m not the only person trying to view comics this way. It’s not even particularly rare. Nevertheless, for me it’s important because otherwise I might as well be reading and writing about conventional novels. As far as what I’m looking at at the moment goes, I’m spending a lot of time on the Hernandez brothers, and I’m concerned because I fear my affection for them is based on a contradiction of everything I say above. I’m also thinking a lot about Jordan Crane and his excellent Uptight series. David N. Wright: It’s a little known fact that Graphixia was actually born, in part, out of a desire to establish the Canadian Society for Studies in the Graphic Narrative. The afterglow of that endeavour lingers in Graphixia’s web address which, though soon to be changed (hint, hint), still collects the representative society letters. That said, the whole society thing is a good starting point for how my perspective on comics has changed as I have lingered over the commentaries offered in this space. The first and most obvious transformation is in what I call comics. I used to get all hung up on debates about what to call comics. You can see it in the society name: “graphic narrative.” I still get drawn into debates about nomenclature, but for the most part I really like just calling comics comics, or strips, or books. I’m more comfortable with what they are and more comfortable not being drawn into theoretical debates that don’t really advance the conversation. The second and more obscure change is apparent in the diversity of subject-matter I have tackled. When I came into this, I was pretty canonical. I was all Maus, Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns and maybe a few other fairly well-known, canonical, comics. I really didn’t see comics as a medium with depth. Sure, there were intricate story-lines and rich histories, but I tended to dismiss these things in favour of the single closed narrative. As it stands, I am no more interested in intricate story-lines or rich histories, but I do cast my net much wider. I read with more depth and I tend to choose from a more diverse set of comics that reflect that effort. I’ll end with this: where I stand in relation to comics is with the crew at Graphixia. Comics are often a private thing, a secret under the covers, between you and the flashlight. If the last 100 posts has yielded anything, it’s a community. And that’s awesome. Brenna Clarke Gray: I’ve always read a lot of Canadian comics as an extension of my interest in Canadian cultural production, generally. But I also had a full set of Marvel trading cards and a healthy collection of Beano comics. So, I stumbled upon the Graphixia project because I happened to become employed where Dave and Peter are employed and they needed a comic-liking Canadianist to yell at about Louis Riel and I kind of think they thought I might be cool enough. I had never really thought of comics scholarship as separate from the multimodal intertextual visual cultural work I cheekily call English literature out of a need to be employed somewhere -- my work has always involved “reading” public art and tv shows and film and web documents in addition to more traditional modes of literature, and I saw comics as an extension of that. I mostly just wandered around doing whatever I wanted, as is my custom, typically. I was a naive reader, approaching comics from the perspective of a fan and cobbling together a philosophy of reading comics that drew from all sorts of different theoretical backgrounds--sort of an inch deep and a mile wide. I’m not sure I’ve developed greater nuance in my reading, but I’m more aware of the limitations of my approach. I think being involved with Graphixia has helped to inform me of the depth and breadth of issues around comics scholarship and become aware of more controversy than I probably cared to be, really. I’ve had the opportunity to take the comics show on the road and find out that it’s worth being a comics scholar just to hang out with other comics scholars, who are super fun. The debates and discussion and collaborations have been powerful; I’m a better comics reader now for my more developed understanding. But I also (pretend to) care less. Scott Marsden: I love anniversary issues. Graphixia reaching the milestone of #100 feels like a significant achievement, and I wish there was a way to give it a die-cut, holographic cover and polybag it with a button and a poster, though it seems like this kind of fanfare is an anachronism in the wake of digital publishing. My time with Graphixia has been enlightening, as it’s changed not only the types of comics I read but the way in which I engage with them. Being the Graphixia “archivist,” I’ve been collecting comics, predominantly of the superhero variety, since I was around ten years old. I remember my first subscription service at the (now defunct) comicshop Talkin’ Illustrations in Surrey, cutting class every Wednesday to pick up the latest issues of the multiple series that I read even at that early age. Giving a history of my experiences with the medium over the years, however, would ultimately turn into a David Copperfield-sized tome, so instead I’ll leave it at this: comics were a significant part of my formative years, and they shaped how I engaged with the world. Through the intricately woven fictions of the DC, Marvel and Image universes, I was able to access morality and strength of character as filtered through the metaphors of the fantastic, bringing me outside of (or strangely deeper into) the surface reality of day to day living. I also learned to appreciate order, continuity and organization, desirous of consuming every story written for my favorite characters. The consistency in these universes brought consistency to mine as well, part of the reason I harped on it so much in my early posts. Because I’ve been so heavily invested in comics throughout my life (again, I have a collection of over 20,000 individual issues and growing), I’d never really felt a pressing need to justify them as objects of study – for me, their value as literature and pedagogical tools has always been inherent, aspects of the medium that are self-evident because I experienced them firsthand. I did recognize though that they’ve had somewhat of an uphill battle in terms of recognition by academia, and even those “progressive” profs who integrated them into my coursework during my BA and MA still treated them as different, as being outside the canonical norm of studied literature even while extolling their virtues, often patting themselves on the back for including one in their curricula (but never actually suggesting them for essay topics). So comics reading and analysis was something I always pursued in private, sharing insights typically only around the comic shop with other addicts on Wednesdays as new issues landed in our respective boxes. The vast majority of my English work was instead centred on Early Modern studies, with some Modernism thrown in for good measure. Enter Graphixia. I’d known Peter and David for some time, having done marking for them at Douglas college since the start of my MA at Simon Fraser. I was surprised to see that not only were several graphic novels on the reading lists for their classes, they were treated as being legitimate works and not literary eccentricities of the medium. I found this perspective inspiring (even if many of the first year papers I was tasked with grading on these texts were decidedly not), and having discussed my nerdy obsession with comics with both instructors at length, I was invited to join in the monthly contributions of the then relatively new blog. Writing about comics from an academic standpoint has been, I’ve found, very illuminating. Having kept my thoughts on the medium largely to myself and not having written much on it prior to Graphixia, my observations were largely jumbled and disorganized regarding how I understood it – it’s been an interesting experience organizing these into the series of mini-essays that I’ve contributed, as I’ve been able to hash out some of the reasons as to why I appreciate comics so much, presenting them not just to our readers but also, in a way, to myself for the first time. I’ve also found that working in collaboration with others on comics has broadened my horizons beyond what I now recognize were the limiting confines of the superhero genre – of course I’d read some texts like Maus and Persepolis, though I have to admit that prior to the suggestions by the team my scope of reading was largely confined to extensions of the fantastic superhero stories that I read as a child. Not that I now read these any less, still ordering around fifty titles a month, though I appreciate them more as I realize they play a part in a larger canon of works, some of which experiment with the form simply in terms of panelling and guttering that I never thought possible. So what has struck me most about the Graphixia project is this: I’ve now realize that I’ve done myself a disservice by keeping my love of comics to myself over the years and not tailoring my writing around what arguably actually drew me to study English in the first place. Only really through dialogue and exchange with others can we understand our own passions regarding literature or, for that matter, anything else at all. In his “Defense of Poetry,” Shelley writes that “neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which it resembles,” and I think that the statement certainly applies to studying comics or any other medium as well: by understanding how others have engaged with comics and what has driven them to pursue their own studies, I better understand my own motivations that have long only been the subtext of my academic pursuits, and this understanding increases with each weekly post - I only wish I’d been involved with a similar project earlier in my studies. So, for the patently selfish reasons I’ve outlined above, here’s to Graphixia! I can’t wait to see what our next hundred issues have to offer. Hattie Kennedy: I’d always read comics in one form or another, whether it was Bunty, Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes, however a rather casual interest turned serious when my friend Dan recommended that I read Preacher, I was hooked. Since then, thanks to two rather excellent and inspiring English teachers at my secondary school, who encouraged me to use Maus as a key text in my A Levels, I’ve often attempted to incorporate comics into my literary analysis. I was lucky enough to study Text/Image interaction via emblems and bande dessinée during my Undergrad and then to end up in a programme that encourages people to embark upon PhDs on things like graffiti or Québécois comics. I’m a fast reader, kids at school used to amuse themselves timing me, my Mum stopped buying me books as gifts when I was about 6, as I “read them too fast to really enjoy them”, however one of the benefits of learning to read and write about comics is that it has, I think, made me a better reader of prose texts. I am wont to take more time over reading a page, I actually stop to think about what I have just read and I even occasionally reread a page to make sure I have understood it. With my background in literary studies I am constantly catching myself giving precedence to my analysis of the text, however as I become better read, as I become better at reading comics, I find my approach to the image changing. Learning how others approach comics is one of my favourite things about chatting to my fellow comics scholars. At the moment I’m working on the theory chapter of my thesis, so to take my mind off theories that make my brain hurt I’ve been revisiting some of my favourite books. Peter’s recent post about Oliver East’s Trains are... Mint meant that I turned to that first of all, while I have since been enjoying Jimmy Beaulieu’s Le Moral des Troupes and rereading the whole of the Fables series so far. Next up I am going to be reading Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem, which I am very much looking forward to. However, despite all of my enthusiasm for reading and writing about comics, I sometimes find myself mumbling an answer to the question “So what do you do?” or else breezily responding “I’m working on a PhD about Québécois Literature and the Nationalist Movement” and then swiftly moving the conversation on to safer ground, so that I won’t get the universal ‘You Study Comics?!?!?!’ face in response. I know that I shouldn’t be reticent about sharing the subject of my research with others, Comics are cool, and they can be important and exciting and we should let ourselves get excited and passionate about them in front of everyone, not just our fellow comics lovers. So, I am really looking forward to being part of Graphixia and getting overexcited about comics, in public, once every six weeks or so. An avid reader of the site I can’t wait to see what my fellow Graphixians are going to educate and/or excite me about over the next 100 posts! Damon Herd: (Click on the comic to enlarge!)

#101 Adapting the Wolf Man

wilkinsp — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 20:23:30 +0000

I have ambivalent feelings about comics adaptations of works of literature. Freud says that while ambivalence involves feelings of love and hate, it really means hate. That is, whenever we say we are ambivalent about something, we really mean that we don’t like it. My negative feelings towards adaptation come from a sense that it asserts the secondarity of comics to other literature. While I’m sure there are novelizations of Superman and Batman, I doubt that anyone is coming up with a prose remediation of Jaime Hernandez’ Locas. Part and parcel of this secondarity is the notion that the comic is a dumbing down of the original text: the easy version.

For Christmas, I received a copy of The Graphic Canon and for all the great artists whose work appears in it—Eisner, Crumb—I can’t help but feel it is more about the literature than the comics. There’s no Tintin, Asterix, or Batman in it.

Richard Appignanesi (writer) and Slawa Harasymowicz’ (illustrator) adaptation of Freud’s most famous case study, The Wolf Man, the first in what appears to be a series entitled Graphic Freud from Self-Made Hero, gives me some reason to rethink my attitude, though my reservations persist.

For one thing, so much in Freud involves “seeing.” The Wolf Man is particularly known for being the first appearance of “the primal scene” in Freud, where the child sees his or her parents having sex. And when Freud refers to “screen memories,” he’s talking about one image standing in front of another, preventing us from seeing the truth. Freud’s theory is essentially apocalyptic, and like most apocalyptic theories, it is as much about the veil as what lies beneath it.

In Freud’s view, the truths of both the perceived outside world and the intuited inner one are impossible to see, thanks to our own defensive occlusions. To see them would be like looking directly into the sun, so our only option is to study the veil. The cartoon image and comics’ reliance on “the scene” to refer to David’s last post, are good models of the veiledness of the real. The condensations and distortions of icon and caricature may not only be signs and symbols for things in the world; they may also figure our mental processing of the real. The cartoon image is an exposure of the shadow of the thing, the reflection on the wall of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.”

So there’s a great opportunity here to create a “theoretical comic,” one that tests the relationship between the medium and Freud’s ideas. But Appignanesi and Harasymowicz seem ambivalent about that opportunity. If anything, The Wolf Man is somewhat timid in drawing the relationship between the medium of comics and the subject of its adaptation. There isn’t enough reflexivity in the book.

For those who don’t know it, The Wolf Man concerns the problems of an aristocratic Russian, Sergei Pankejeff, who earns his nickname from the fact that he has a dream in which he sees a number of white wolves sitting in a tree outside his bedroom window.

This turns out to be the least of his problems. He suffers from repressed homosexuality, various venereal diseases, psychosomatic gum boils…. He is one seriously messed-up dude. To make matters worse, he appears to be the most irritating kind of psychoanalytic patient: the one who knows something about psychoanalysis.

Harasymowicz’ drawing style is rough and sketchy. At times it looks more psychedelic than psychoanalytic, but then she is trying to capture the interior of Sergei’s mind. She has some great one- and two-page splashes that interpret the images of Sergei’s memory. These pages represent looking inward rather than outward and require some identifying features to indicate that innerness. Not only that, we need to see the various conversions, inversions, distortions, and repressions that someone as troubled as Sergei goes through.

But the writing of The Wolf Man treats the case study as a kind of fictionalized dialogue between Freud and Sergei. Freud’s case studies are more like dramatic monologues than conversations, as he teases out the nuances of what his patients’ stories have revealed to him, and explains them to us, his readership. There’s a fundamental narratological problem with The Wolf Man: there is too much emphasis on what is told rather than in the mode of telling. For Freud, the mode of telling is crucial. Who talks and who listens and how makes all the difference.

Any adaptation involves condensation and displacement of the material it works with. It’s unrealistic, uninteresting, and un-Freudian to expect an adaptation to be “true to the original.” But I wanted an adaptation whose distortion captivates the imagination as much as Sergei’s dream of the wolves sitting in the tree outside his window.

Oliver East and Allan Haverholm Interview

admin — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 15:58:14 +0000

On Jan. 29, 2013 we were lucky enough to score an interview with Oliver East and Allan Haverholm. Peter and I ask a few questions and we have a few laughs: Make sure you buy some of their stuff: Oliver's work and Allan's work.

#102 Darwyn Cooke: Adaptation as Personal Aesthetic

admin — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 20:14:13 +0000

Darwyn Cooke is a well-known comics author. He’s recently published the third in his series adapting Richard Stark’s Parker and just wrapped up the six-issue run of Before Watchmen: Minutemen. What’s striking about Cooke’s work is how his art reflects the aesthetics of the 1950s. In fact, he’s been somewhat typecast as the go-to artist for “hard-boiled” stories that need to reflect a 1930–50's aesthetic (like the aforementioned Minutemen series). What interests me about Cooke is the way he represents adaption in comics on a number of levels. He’s adapted hard-boiled crime novels (Parker) into excellent books the highlights of which are the sharp and elegant lines that reinforce the subject-matter (a classic poke in the argument about the relationship between form and content). Cooke was also part of two adaptive re-boots: The Minutemen series that prequeled the canonical Watchmen and Catwoman who Cooke re-imagined with the same panache that dominates his Parker adaptation.

At the same time, Cooke has adapted the 1930's and 50's aesthetic to suit his own aesthetic principles and has, as a result, carved out a niche for himself in the comics world. Cooke’s art is at once intensely original and strongly derivative. His works harkens back to the general move in the 1950s away from the circular, centreline formula of drawing cartoon characters toward a more sharp-edged or expressionistic style reflective of the entrenchment of Modernism. His work belongs to an era where “artists conceived a bold visual style that was derived from the modern arts, assimilating and adapting the principles of Cubism, Surrealism, and Expressionism” (Amidi 7). At the time, such moves were seen as expanding the definitions of cartooning (or comics) and incorporating elements of graphic design into a low-brow artform. It was an era where artists in popular media forms such as animation, cartooning, and comics “renewed emphasis on the linear nature of the medium, and the use of the line was more pronounced, often playing as important a role in delineating character as shapes and forms" (Amidi 10).

What Cooke does then is adapt the emerging aesthetic of animation and design in the 1950s in order to serve his own aesthetic principles. On another level, Cooke is also making apparent the always already status of comicbook artist as adapter. There are only a finite number of character types in the comic world, just as there are in Literature, or other art forms. Our creative and representative impulses are always somewhat limited by the scope of our humanity. Comicbook artists in particular are constrained by the norms of the medium which, in some sense, demand a return to the basic tenets of either history (the origin story) or a set of aesthetic principles. Most comicbook artists, whether mainstream or not, can point out the manner in which their art builds on or reacts to the work of earlier artists in the medium (or other media for that matter).

The originality of Cooke’s art is not necessarily in the art itself, but how he adapts it. He doesn't seem to make any pretences about the originality of his art beyond its simple presentation. That said, within the aesthetic there are clear signs that he is intensely invested in the era and the aesthetic principles that represent it. He draws the Parker series in two tones only, picking one colour as dominant for each adaptation (yellow, blue, grey are the dominant single colours depending on the edition). His art then reflects the pulp printing of his subject and its position at the epoch of its era. A cynical critic could accuse Cooke of simply copying a style of art and doing nothing wholly original with it, but this would ignore the careful craftsmanship that goes into making an adaptation look like a “pure” adaptation, one that loses no fidelity in its translation from one era or author to another.

The sharpness of Cooke’s line is his adaptive nod to the aesthetics he values. Those lines are representative in that they reflect that move to incorporate the principles of graphic design and the inspiration of the Modern arts.

At the same time, the lines are metaphoric; they hold within them the stylistic flourish of the earlier artists in other media from which Cooke takes his cues—the Madison avenue Art Department’s, the television animators, and the hard-lined Dick Tracy. Finally, those lines are intensely personal, expressing Cooke’s own stake in the graphic archive and his flair for making the established or entrenched appear wholly original again. Work Cited: Amidi, Amid. Ed. Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in Fifties Animation. San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 2006.

#103 Adapting Batman for Cuteness and Depth

Grayb — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 20:42:54 +0000

I'm so very excited that we're doing adaptations this month, because a friend introduced me to one last week that I'm completely in love with: JL8, Yale Stewart's re-imaging of the Justice League if they were eight year olds. It's amazing. I've been talking a lot about adaptation lately because my students have been doing some work on adaptation with Scott Pilgirm's Precious Little Life and its film version. One of the things we've been discussing is how one way of deeming an adaptation "successful" is if you learn more about or deepen your understanding of a character through the adaptation. Adaptations, when they are really strong, can give us another way into the text that can nuance our interpretation of the source material. That is certainly true of this delightful webcomic series JL8. While it's called JL8, and while all the characters (and even some of the villains -- and yes, Lex Luthor was a dbag even when he was 8) get a look-in, the character the series really focuses on is Batman. Little Bruce Wayne, and the way he responds to his friends and the grownups around him, definitely offers a new way of thinking about the Caper Crusader. The comic series takes place after Bruce is orphaned, so we get a sense of the depth of his loneliness in some really beautifully constructed panels. Bruce is little and lonely and scared, and his lack of connection to home and family fuels his need to keep the structure of his school life intact, and helps to explain his desire to control and shape the interactions of his peers. We see in this early Bruce Wayne all that will go on to define him as a full-grown superhero and iconic character: he broods, he holds grudges, he is powered by loneliness and anger. Stewart's use of Superman as a foil shows Clark Kent's homelife and stability as motivation for his good-guy persona. In one story arc, all the boys are upset when their apprehending of a thief (because she was stealing from a Nana and no one steals from a Nana!) is reported as a story about little boys. They want to be seen as men! But where Bruce/Batman's concern with reputation and appearance makes him vaguely insane (believing the purse-snatching was staged for the purpose of defaming his character), Clark/Superman ends the story arc by asserting that appearances only matter to people who don't. Harsh. I like this series because it gets at Bruce Wayne in a manner that both humanizes him and points out his character flaws. But it also makes clear that while these behavioural issues and flaws emerge from his traumatized past, that past also makes him the hero the playground needs. Basically it's an adorable series and example of why playing with these archetypal characters in varying adaptations can be so useful -- even for the most slavishly canonical among us. Imaging these characters into other situations -- ones that explain where they come from and what has shaped their behaviour -- can help to deepen or nuance characters who can, over time, start to feel flat and distant from our experiences. Go read JL8. So friggin' cute.

#104 Adapting Adaptations: First Publishing’s Classics Illustrated

smarsden — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 23:31:10 +0000

I’ve always had a fondness for comic book adaptations, both of film and of literature – I find that there’s often a fuzzy line between media, particularly when they’re visual, and sometimes I enjoy the difficulty I encounter in attempting to remember whether an image came from a film or from its subsequent graphic adaptation (though in recent years, this direction of translation has clearly been dramatically reversed). One of the earliest series I collected as a child was First Publishing’s Classics Illustrated, and though this may seem the low-lying fruit of adaptation as a topic, the series deserves acknowledgement for the way it changed expectations of the genre. First’s 1990 version of Classics Illustrated, the third volume to bear the name, showcased experimental writers, unpredictable (and often surreal) artists, innovative methods of juxtaposing text with images and a prestige squarebound format on rich paper stock to highlight the import of the stories. Published only a few years after the transformative Dark Knight Returns, Classics Illustrated was intent on demonstrating the difference between a comic book and a graphic novel, insistent through its art and storytelling that it be set aside from both its contemporaries in the superhero genre and its predecessors in the often crudely drawn and bland retellings of the English canon that readers encountered in the previous manifestations of the title. It was easily the classiest component of my early collection, and it was always what I pointed to when attempting to show the merits of the medium to others. First’s Classics Illustrated, as I see it, is itself an adaptation of a series based on adaptation. The differences across the volumes are staggering, and though these indicate a general evolution in the comics’ medium on the whole, that the series bears the same name speaks to its reliance on the marketing done by its forebears – First’s version of Classics Illustrated seems intent of producing adaptations in which the attention paid to the image was equal to the quality of the text it represented. An example can be seen in the difference between these two versions of Robinson Crusoe, one my father’s copy and the other my own. The art improved and became more experimental (with Bill Sienkiewicz’s fully painted, dreamlike Moby Dick and the watercolours of Tom Mandrake’s Hamlet being standouts), and the shift is indicative of an important transition in comics – though these are still entrypoints for youth to engage with literature, First suggests a different approach in eschewing traditional images couched in realism. By offering experimental format, guttering and art, these adaptations promote a more metaphoric engagement with the text that operates both at the visual as well as the literary level. Kyle Baker’s take on Alice in Wonderland is a strong case in point, as the surrealism of the images juxtaposed by text that lies outside its panels calls for the story to be accessed in two separate ways, promoting a metatextual reading that is at the heart of literary criticism. Baker takes full advantage of the affordances of the medium to prompt engagement in a way previously unexploited in retelling the classics in graphic form. The separation of word and image here ironically draws them closer together, calling for an interaction with the text that is more nuanced and subjective. It is less cartoonish than it is exploratory, toying with the imaginative hyperbole inherent in the original. Though the story remains a faithful retelling, through its art it is infused with a slanted interpretation that emphasizes a personal response instead of a simple transcription with the goal of guiding its readers to the original novel. Here and in the rest of First’s Classics Illustrated series, we see for the first time that adaptation in comics allows for these revisionings to have literary merit in their own right, adding to our understanding of the source material and taking it in a potentially different direction rather than simply regurgitating it for younger audiences. Bolter and Grusin note that “a medium is that which remediates. It is that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real” (65). While this is true of the English canon being translated into graphic novels, remediation can also happen within a medium itself – comics, and the motivations behind both narrative and image, have changed so significantly over the decades that they are hardly even comparable. The shift we see in Classics Illustrated, which was similarly present during the same timeframe in Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum, indicates a poststructuralist turn in the medium that accesses our collective desire for more depth out of literature (as the panels to the left taken from Moby Dick clearly show). As Classics Illustrated was my first foray into most of these canonical texts, I have an affinity for the way they helped me learn to read – not with a focus on understanding the reality of the text, but acknowledging that I could refashion it to my liking through subjective interpretation, using the dialogue and setting as suggestions to pursue alternate readings and make its reality more my own. One can argue that the medium of comics has evolved over the last hundred years, but I’m more of the mind that it has only adapted to our literary and cultural expectations based on the precedents it set for itself in its earlier manifestations. Works Cited Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. Print. Carroll, Lewis. Classics Illustrated: Through the Looking Glass. Adapt. Kyle Baker. New York: Berkley / First Publishing, 1990. Print. Melville, Herman. Classics Illustrated: Moby Dick. Adapt. Bill Sienkiewcz. New York: Berkley / First Publishing, 1990. Print.

#105 1001 Nights of Snowfall: The Fairytale Reinvented

hattiek — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 22:51:04 +0000

I too was pretty excited when I saw that the theme for my first ‘proper’ post on Graphixia was to be about Adaptation. I am a big fan of ‘cover versions’ whether musical, literary or cinematic and this seemed like the ideal opportunity to rabbit on about one of my favourite comics. Just as I tend to prefer a musical cover version that does something new with the material (one of the reasons that I love Ryan Adam’s ‘Wonderwall’ and can’t bring myself to be bothered by Alexandra Burke’s ‘Hallelujah’) so I quite like my literary adaptations to do something new and a bit different with their source stories. This is particularly true in the case of reinterpretations or adaptations of fairy tales; I have certainly read enough straight up and down retellings of Sleeping Beauty for one lifetime. 1001 Nights of Snowfall is a spin off from the ever-popular Fables series created by Bill Willingham. In case you haven’t read or heard of Fables it takes characters from fairy tales and re-imagines them in a contemporary setting, forced into exile from their homelands by a mysterious figure known as The Adversary. They now reside in Uptown New York in an enclave they have named Fabletown. Fables itself offers many opportunities for discussion of the particular perks and pitfalls of adaptation, however it is the spinoff, 1001 Nights of Snowfall that was published in 2006, that I would like to discuss here. Published in hardback form in 2006, with illustrations from artists such as Charles Vess, Jill Thompson and Brian Boll, 1001 Nights of Snowfall takes the opportunity to retell some of the origins stories of the most popular characters appearing in Fables in the form of an adaptation of the Arabian Nights story. Set in the 19^th Century, as Snow White travels as an emissary from Fabletown to the Arabian Fables’ lands in order to try to form an alliance, she is held prisoner by the Sultan and threatened with death. Snow delays her seemingly inevitable execution by weaving a fantastic tale every evening. Each tale is illustrated by a different artist in a noticeably different style; from John Bolton’s dreamlike art that softens the horrors contained with his tale, to James Jean’s use of a limited colour palette of greens and greys to tell the story of the Frog Prince. The changes in artwork as the book shifts from tale to tale subtly remind the reader of the passing of time within the larger story of Snow’s agreement with the Sultan. 1001 Nights of Snowfall presents just ten of these supposed tales, varying in length and depth. So far, so conventional, however this is where the conventionality ends as Willingham takes the opportunity to weave a thread of darkness through each of these stories. So in a reversal of the expected dynamic, a brave hare is transformed into a prince until such a time as he manages to find true love with a female hare. While Bigby Wolf, you may know him better as the Big Bad Wolf, has his origins and later irascible personality explained with the tragic tale of how his mother died alone of a broken heart after bearing the North Wind a litter of cubs. However my favourites in the collection are those that bookend it, first of all Snow tells the story of her own marriage to Prince Charming and how she sought revenge on the seven dwarves who had kept her captive over many years. These are not the Happy and Bashful variant of dwarf. No, these dwarves slink up from the kingdom under the ground and act out their depraved fantasies on unlucky and unsuspecting maidens. Through this story we see a little of the steely core that has formed the Snow of the Fables universe and see the cracks forming in her ever stormy relationship with Prince Charming. Meanwhile the final tale, that of King Cole, is not only a touching story of the sacrifices made by a king to preserve the lives of his subjects but also an opportunity to see a deeper side to a character that is only really allowed space within the main arc to exist as comic relief. I think this is where this volume’s charm and success lies. It offers an opportunity for Willingham to not only subvert and reinvent the origins stories of these familiar characters but also offers a chance for a Fables fan to further immerse themselves in this world. 1001 Nights of Snowfall is most definitely more than the sum of its parts, just as Fabletown is more than a motley collection of mostly forgotten about characters from fairytales. With this series in general, and this book in particular, Willingham offers adaptations and subversions of too familiar characters that cause us to rethink the assumptions we have made when consuming these stories elsewhere. Certain key elements remains, Bigby Wolf still huffs and puffs to blow that house down, but his lifelong quest to become bigger and stronger so as to avenge the death of his mother causes us to think back to that oh so familiar tale of three little piggies and look beyond the one-dimensional wolf that is presented to us elsewhere. By reimagining these characters and their stories, by writing origins stories that delve either side of the conventional narrative scope of these well worn fairy tales, Willingham has created an adaptation that enhances our readings of the source material and exists as an engaging and entertaining series in its own right. Works Cited Willingham, Bill, 1001 Nights of Snowfall, New York: Vertigo. 2006.

#106 American Splendor: What's In A Name?

damon — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 20:00:31 +0000

My fellow Graphixians have focused mainly on adaptation into (or between) the medium of comics. For my first ‘proper’ post I will be looking at American Splendor as an example of a comics adaptation into film. I recently reread ‘The Harvey Pekar Name Story’ from the collection Bob & Harv's Comics. ‘Bob & Harv’ are artist Robert Crumb and writer Harvey Pekar, and the story originally appeared in the second issue of American Splendor in 1977. Each of the four pages in the strip consists of a strict twelve-panel grid and in each panel Crumb has drawn a man ‘talking’ to the reader. Between each panel there are only minor alterations in the man’s body movements and facial expression. The strip is a masterclass in comics pacing, with subtle changes in the drawings and ellipses in the speech bubbles giving a sense of the movement of time. Several panels do not contain dialogue but just show the man staring out of the page. These act as punctuation in the text, adding pauses and visual information to the story.

What struck me on this particular reading was that the person depicted in the panels, in Crumb's typical closely hatched style, is not Harvey Pekar. The word balloons contain information about the 'speaker' that lead us to believe that he is Harvey Pekar, the writer of American Splendor, such as the biographical information that his middle name is Lawrence and the fact he married at a young age and then later divorced, but the images are quite different to how Crumb draws Pekar in other stories.

In Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature Charles Hatfield noted that the man named ‘Harvey Pekar’ was ‘not to be confused with the author’ (2005: 45). Harvey is usually depicted as being quite dishevelled but the character in this strip is clean-shaven and wearing a suit and tie. I cannot recall any other strip where Pekar is dressed like this. Even taking into account that dozens of artists have drawn Pekar over the years, the caricatures usually have a reasonable consistency in how Harvey looks. However, as Hatfield states ‘’The Harvey Pekar Name Story’ puts paid to the notion of a singular self’ (2005: 126). The differences in various artist’s drawings of Pekar allowed enough ambiguity for Harvey’s future wife Joyce Brabner to be worried about which version of all the Harvey's she had seen in the comics was going to be waiting for her at the bus station when she arrived in Cleveland.

In ‘Hustlin’ Sides’, the other strip drawn by Crumb in issue two, Harvey looks more like other drawn versions of Pekar, with his hunched over walking style, scruffy T-shirt and swept forward hair. However, Crumb and Pekar further complicate matters by calling this version of Harvey ‘Jack the Bellboy’. It may be that, in only the second issue of American Splendor, Crumb had not yet settled on depicting Harvey as a ‘realistic’ caricature of Pekar, and Pekar himself is not yet completely comfortable in divulging the details of his job without the use of a pseudonym for his autobiographical avatar. In the third issue the different artists seem settled on the Pekar’s physical appearance but he is still not named in the strips, often referred to as ‘our man’ or ‘our hero’ and once again as ‘Jack the Bellboy’. In 2003, several strips from American Splendor were adapted into a film, which also contained scenes from the stand-alone graphic memoir Our Cancer Year written by Pekar and Brabner and drawn by Frank Stack. The movie was directed by documentary filmmakers Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini and starred Paul Giamatti as Pekar and Hope Davis as Brabner. The film plays with the idea of there being no singular self by having the real-life Pekar and Brabner appear in the film alongside, and interacting with, the actors. Both Pekar and Giamatti narrate the film’s voice-over at different times. In one scene the actors are shown attending a theatre adaptation of the American Splendor comics. On stage the actors are playing actors playing Giamatti and Davis playing Pekar and Brabner. The levels of commentary on versions of the self become dizzying. Near the end of the film, while undergoing treatment for cancer, Pekar has a breakdown and becomes confused as to whether he is a real person ‘tell me the truth, am I a guy who writes about himself in a comic book, or am I just a character in that book?’. He passes out and this scene leads to a version of ‘The Harvey Pekar Name Story’. In the film Paul Giamatti talks to the camera but, unlike the comic, this version looks like Harvey Pekar. At first he is a figure in the mid-distance and as he walks towards the camera the room appears around him drawn in a hatched style similar to Crumb’s. In contrast to the comic Harvey moves around in the frame, the background changes and he walks outside. The first two pages of the strip are omitted, there is no need to introduce a character we have spent the last 90 minutes watching, and we jump straight to Giamatti as Pekar discussing other Harvey Pekars in the telephone directory. The dialogue is almost exactly as in the strip and as Pekar says ‘These were the other Harvey Pekars’ we see a ghostly vision of the actual Harvey Pekar walk across the screen behind him. As in the strip we question the various versions of Pekar presented to us. Both the scene and the strip end the same way with ‘Harvey Pekar’ in the middle of the frame asking ‘What’s in a name? Who is Harvey Pekar?’and then staring out at the viewer/reader. The truth being that, as the many years of American Splendor comics show, there are countless Harvey Pekars. While thinking about this piece I was inspired to create my own ‘cover version’ of ‘The Harvey Pekar Name Story’. You can see ‘The Damon Herd Name Story’ at last week’s Graphixia Thursday post here. Works cited American Splendor, 2003 [Film]. Directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. USA: Good Machine and HBO Films. Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Pekar, Harvey, Brabner, Joyce & Stack, Frank. Our Cancer Year. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994. Pekar, Harvey & Crumb, Robert. Bob & Harv’s Comics. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996.

#107 Austen Gets Graphic: Marvel's Northanger Abbey

mccauslande — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:09:19 +0000

I’m not much of a comics reader, but I do love Jane Austen and have long been interested in adaptations of her work and her pop-cultural afterlife. So I was delighted when Peter gave me a copy of Marvel’s Northanger Abbey. Adapting Austen is tricky business, because one of the most significant and beloved features of her work is the ironic voice of the omniscient narrator. How can that be conveyed in another medium? Film versions generally give some of the narrator’s best, most iconic lines to characters, as in the BBC Pride and Prejudice, in which Jennifer Ehle delivers the assertion that “a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” But typically much of the narrator’s voice is lost, and with it some of the wit, social commentary, and moral force of the novels. Period-correct film and television adaptations of Austen tend to flatten her novels into romantic costume dramas. They often seem to put (relative) faithfulness to the source material ahead of exploiting the possibilites of the medium they’re adapting it into. For this reason, some of the adaptations I find most satisfying are those that revive the social commentary by transporting Austen to a new setting or adapting her more freely, like Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park (1999), Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1995), or the online series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (developed by Hank Green and Bernie Su), which uses social media like Tumblr and Twitter to elaborate and comment on the main storyline. The cover of Marvel’s Northanger Abbey suggests a romantic costume drama type of adaptation. So, too, does the choice of Nancy Butler as the writer. Butler wrote 12 Signet Regency romances, and the traditional Regency is arguably a kind of “adaptation” of Austen’s work (and even more, Georgette Heyer’s) into genre romance form. Butler and artist Janet K. Lee's adaptation is essentially a romantic comedy, focusing on the relationships among the Morlands, Tilneys and Thorpes: the misadventures of young lovers in Bath. Butler’s introduction describes Northanger Abbey as “Jane Austen on steroids,” suggesting that its parody of the Gothic strips out the “emotional underpinnings” of her other novels, leaving only “broad comedy.” Lee’s somewhat exaggerated, caricatured style reflects a similar view of the story, and I thought it worked best for the most broadly-drawn characters. John Thorpe’s big head, for instance, symbolizes his inflated ego; his bullying is reflected in the way he often looms over female characters or stands with legs apart, dominating the scene. But the novel is not just a parody of the Gothic: it also provides its heroine–and its reader–with an education in how to read both novels and other people. Without the narrator’s commentary, much of this is lost. A little of the famous “only a novel” speech is incorporated into Catherine’s dialogue, but this way of including it undercuts its force. If the speech is delivered by ignorant Catherine rather than the witty narrator, should we take it seriously? Moreover, if Catherine were wise enough at the start of the story to recognize that in the novel “the greatest powers of the mind are displayed,” she would not need the education in reading that Northanger Abbey the novel and Northanger Abbey the estate give her. This aspect of the novel isn’t entirely elided, though. Catherine’s gradual understanding of her misperceptions is still an integral part of the plot, of course, and is also reflected more subtly in the illustrations. Isabella Thorpe, for instance, often appears distorted or askew, suggesting that Catherine isn’t perceiving her clearly. I found this adaptation least successful when it came to considering the way Northanger Abbey deploys Gothic conventions. Because while Austen mocks the excesses of the genre, she takes its politics–the tyranny of the patriarchy, the bullying nature of fathers and brothers–seriously, showing how they are found not just in spooky European castles but in the safe English countryside with its roads and newspapers. Catherine may not find a skeleton at the Abbey, but she is sent home from it unattended when the General discovers she’s not an heiress. Certainly the physical power and occasional menace of both John Thorpe and General Tilney are on display: But I found the drawings of Catherine–alternately smirky and pouty, like the other young women–didn’t convey her fear or humiliation effectively. There are emotional underpinnings in this novel, but they are mostly lost in the broadly comic art. I enjoyed Marvel’s Northanger Abbey, but like most Austen adaptations, it’s not a patch on the original. I wish Butler and Lee had exploited their medium more fully to provide new perspective on Austen’s novel rather than light entertainment. Butler, Nancy (w) and Janet K Lee (a). Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. New York: Marvel, 2012.

#108 Coming of Age (or Not) in Mats Jonsson's Hey Princess

wilkinsp — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 02:20:43 +0000

Coming of age stories are as much about the zeitgeist and spirit of place as they are about the age of the focal character or memoirist. These narratives concern a person’s transition to adulthood at a particular historical moment, in a particular place, with the cultural associations of both. Because this moment and place are always in the past, the “tense” of such stories is intriguing, simultaneously retrospective and prospective. They look back on a time when a person was stepping over a threshold into the future. Consequently, although they purport to capture what was hip, happening, and future-looking in a moment, such narratives are always already nostalgic. Mats Jonsson’s autobiographical comic Hey Princess, puts him temporally in the indie pop world of the 1990’s and physically in Stockholm’s Southside. Jonsson is keenly aware of the temporal paradox of his comic memoir: his representation of himself as “cool” is shadowed by his knowledge that, even at the time, he was yesterday’s boy. The question at the end of the book is whether he is willing to realize that and move on, or if he remains stuck in his temporal bubble. Of course, that question implies that it is right to move on rather than cling to youth; it is not clear that Jonsson believes such a thing. Jonsson consistently critiques his past persona’s shallowness and insubstantiality in Hey Princess, presenting himself as a collection of cultural associations orbiting a hollow core. Comics are a particularly effective medium for conveying such metonomies in the way they use labels on t-shirts and posters and icons to create associations. In this sense, Hey Princess is similar to Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim. Like O’Malley, Jonsson uses labels to enmesh an obscure (unless we are familiar with the Swedish pop scene of the 1990s) national media culture in the global one. Popsicle and Komeda thus get to enter the same orbit as Pulp and Big Black while simultaneously acheiving cachet as representative Swedish artists. The title of the book is taken from the name of a song, just like the title of Scott Pilgrim. Comics like these suggest that metonymic identity is the foundation and appeal of youth culture, creating tribes based on signs and symbols. Hence, Mats’ obsession with “indie” girls demonstrates a desire to find a complementary set of signs and symbols to the ones that he is attached to: Big Black t-shirts, a certain fringe to the haircut, and turn up jeans. If this seems shallow, that is Jonsson’s point. Hey Princess reflects on the shallowness of lifestyle identification through a particular pop culture moment. Mats might as well be John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. That Mats is aware of this fact doesn’t necessarily redeem him. Indeed, Jonsson teases us with the possibility of his own redemption, playing on our expectation that he will “see the light” and leave his shallow, superficial world for the solidity of adulthood. But Mats’ has a Peter Pan element to his personality; he feels a strong pull to remain in indie world, even though time and age are pushing him out. For instance, when he and a friend go to an “indie” club, a man, perhaps the club’s bouncer, tells them: “Sorry, but it’s kind of young tonight…one of them pop-clubs, so you won’t have much fun” (409). When Mats embarks on a relationship with a 17 year old girl (he is in his mid-twenties), it highlights his increasingly perverse identification with youth. When Martina’s friends use a language that alienates him and listen to music that he doesn’t appreciate, we see that contemporary youth culture is moving beyond him. Even if Mats wants to stay in the indie world, that world no longer exists as Mats knew it. Again, Mats is completely conscious of this fact; he reflects on how a new Pulp song no longer has what it takes to be a hit. The other pillar of the coming of age narrative, besides pop culture metonymies, is the assumption of sexual identity. Hey Princess narrates a series of failed relationships, love stories that do not work because nothing substantial underlies the attraction. We never get much insight into the girls Mats goes out with, except perhaps for the mentally disturbed goth girl who threatens suicide. Mats’ narcissism means that he needs to work out his relationship with himself before he can succeed with another person. At the end of Hey Princess, Jonsson states that he had one eye on the mirror when entered the indie lifestyle, and that he can’t remember when he stopped looking at it. The loss of the mirror has two contrasting meanings. The first, more positive meaning, is that it could mean the loss of Mats’ narcissism. He is no longer so self-absorbed and self-concerned. The second, more negative meaning, is that it could mean that Mats has lost all capacity for self-reflection and has no distance on his personality at all, ironic or otherwise. The ending is undecidable. We don’t know if Mats’ latest girlfriend is just a continuation of a series of indie girls or a terminal point. Perhaps the best way to express Jonsson’s relationship to his youth culture world is through an analysis of his drawing style. Mats Jonsson draws in a way that looks primitive; his lines are thick and sloppy looking, as if drawn with a felt marker with a uniform thickness. However, the style might be called “faux crude” because it is actually highly detailed and well-proportioned. It gives Hey Princess an indie feel to match Mats’ enthusiasm for indie music and indie girls. But like many “indie” products, the comic is more about possessing a particular style rather than any “independence” from the publishing and music production worlds. This is not to diminish Jonsson’s accomplishment; his book is after all an assertion of the significance of style. Work Cited Jonsson, Mats. Hey Princess. Trans: Mikael Weichbrodt. Marietta: Top Shelf, 2010.

#109 Inspiration and Integration: Why Comics Can't Come of Age

admin — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 07:08:45 +0000

Comics seem to come of age every ten years or so as the art form responds to innovations from its practitioners. Some might point to the Golden Age of comics in the 1950s as a the moment when comics came of age; others might harken further back to George Herriman's Krazy Kat and Ignatz, or the introduction of that cinematic mouse with the rounded ears; some would ask us to look to the late-sixties surge of underground comix and there decidedly anti-insitutitional narratives; still others might point to Art Spiegelman's Maus as the moment comics came of age as a medium for storytelling. There are no doubt many meandering and insightful conversations to be had about when exactly comics, as a medium, came of age. All this to say that coming of age is not always dependent on a reading of the subject. Sometimes, we need to think about how narrative forms, or design forms, architectures perhaps, come of age in response to the subject matter or the cultural context in which those architectures find themselves representing. Making connections between the evolution of a medium and the cultural evolutions surrounding them seems almost like a moot point. However, comics are one of the few media often described as responding to their cultural surroundings. They appear to come of age again and again, getting connected with multiple forms of other media wherein comics are often cited as inspiration for stylistic choices and narrative practices. In other words, we are quick to show how comics are like other media and, most often, we say that comics are like whatever dominant media are in the cultural conversation and themselves coming of age. When newspapers and Yellow Journalism came of age, The Yellow Kid arrived fully formed with his witty smocked placard performing the kind of “literary” critique that drew attention to the dispositions between high and low journalism. As radio and the cinema began to establish themselves, Herriman’s Krazy Kat began testing the medium’s response to surrealism and the comedic syncopations of vaudeville and burlesque. Cinema brought with a more coherent relationship with its storyboards and animations. The arrival of digital CG shows us on the brink of yet another linkage between comics architectures and creative practices of cinematic representation. In short, as other media come of age, comics seem to respond by also coming of age at the same moment. They are both inspired by and influence on emerging visual media, in particular. Coming of age narratives are ultimately about personal origin stories. Comics possess an atypical connection to the origin stories that signal both the architectures and the story-lines of emerging media, which themselves are searching for their own origin stories or coming of age in the eyes of mass culture. The baseline point here is that comics are embedded in the fabric of twentieth-century and twenty-first century artistic practice, particularly so in the veins of the visual media that so dominate our environments. What we need to do is start critiquing the architectures of comics to see how they are responding to shifts in formative associations -- the kids aren't reading the same superman. Perhaps the clearest signal that comics are coming of age in, well, a different age is the way they reveal their foundational architectures through practice. Instead of dissolving into the tactile and analogue world of the pen, comics coming of age in a new landscape are dissolving into the foundational 8-bit square. On the other hand, comics are the bedrock of new experiments that endeavor to make the old new again, making comics not into cinema but more like a video game:

Project Gamma features digital comics with embedded audio, which plays as readers browse or read through. The music and background adapts to both the events in the comic and the reader's behaviour. The project is an attempt to make reading a more immersive experience, like being inside a video game, according to Marvel executives. (source)

It's telling that comics seem to come back to their roots in the golden age of radio in order to go forward and make themselves more akin to video games. We always configure comics around the cinema but they remain unbound, taking their coming of age narratives into new forums. Or are they old forms made new by that impetus to meld media so inherent in comics' text/image coherence? Have comics come of age? Nope. Like superman they remain in a perpetual state of influence and integration. Remaining inert but constantly on the vanguard of an evolving cultural moment. Comics and the creative architectures associated with them resist coming of age and at the same time remain adaptable to and representative of the artistic innovations that mark the era.

#110 Can Archie Comics Come of Age? Going Gay in Gay Old Riverdale

Grayb — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 19:19:34 +0000

In 2010, Archie Comics made the decision to leap into the twenty-first century and include, gasp!, a gay character. His name is Kevin Keller, and it was a huge deal in Riverdale when he was introduced. Of course, there was predictable ire from all the places that are predictably ire-laden, but for the most part Kevin's introduction was pretty positive.* People were excited to see stogy, heteronormative Riverdale come of age; growing up in the twenty-first century, critics praised, requires exactly this sort of openness and contemporary thinking. But was it really such a grand, forward-thinking move? I've been rereading those comics this week and thinking about exactly that. In the end, Kevin Keller works because he's easily slotted into the existing heteronormative and strongly patriarchal world view of Archie Comics. Kevin Keller isn't there to subvert or question assumptions about the way Riverdalers see the world; Kevin's there to show middle Americans from Riverdales-of-the-mind that exist across the US that gay people aren't scary. And that's not Archie Comics coming of age; that's Archie Comics redefining the closet. Riverdale is a supremely heteronormative space. The girls fantasize about marriage. The central love triangle of the series is Veronica and Betty fighting for Archie's admiration. The only character who doesn't actively chase a heterosexual romantic relationship, Jughead, is a misanthropic character who often ends up the butt of the jokes. Every other character is paired up heterosexually; like Barbies and Kens, they reify a particularly dreamy nostalgic version of small-town-America of yore. When Kevin Keller is introduced, then, he must fit in to the existing mode of discourse. He cannot subvert it. Upon Kevin's arrival in Veronica #202, the gag is a pretty tired one: Veronica falls for a guy who doesn't fall for her! But she doesn't know why! I mean, he's like all the other guys in Riverdale. He's athletic and charming and funny. He loves fast food eating contests and music. Oh no, PSYCH, he's totally gay! Hahahaha oh hilarious. But you can forgive Veronica for not knowing. Kevin is structured as a character to fit neatly into the heteronormative realities of Riverdale High's 1950s code. In fact, one of the features that save Kevin from potentially bullying is that he, like all young men in Riverdale, is a strong athlete. Kevin has to earn his place in Riverdale High society as do the other boys; he has to demonstrate physical supremacy. This insulates Kevin from the potentially bullying that we see framing this scene. The other guys want to mock him on the grounds that gay = effeminate. But they can't, because Kevin isn't a gender-bending character here to reshape the boxes. He fits nicely within those boxes as they exist. He's also a well-behaved young man from a military family. His parents met and married very young. His mother stays home and his father was a Colonel until he was injured in the line of duty. Kevin is a devoted big brother to his younger sisters and a committed family man. Except for the whole gay thing (maybe because of the nonthreatening overtones!), he's every parents' dream boyfriend for their daughter. To have any place at all in Riverdale, Kevin has to fulfill the ideal. Hahahah oh stupid Mr. Lodge. Kevin has sex with men! The other way Kevin earns his place is that, as a handsome and eligible young bachelor arriving in town, he offers no threat to the existing romantic order. In fact, as Archie points out, having gay guys around is totally useful for when you don't want to have to do chick stuff, but you don't want your chick to do stuff with other guys! In this way, Kevin is not only just not a subverting force to the role of gender norms in the comic -- he actively reifies it. I'm totally open-minded and accepting of gay people who are useful to me! It's frustrating when such a lauded attempt to normalize the discourse around gay teenagers falls so far short of what it could be. But Archie Comics are constructed within a non-threatening worldview, and Kevin Keller's characterization is definitely non-threatening. But this isn't a coming of age for Archie Comics. Unfortunately, it's just more of the same. As Dave argued last week, comics remain "inert but constantly on the vanguard of an evolving cultural moment." This post takes that argument in another direction, but demonstrates its truth. Footnotes: * There was a firestorm of controversy later, however, when in a flash-forward story arc we see Kevin Keller marry. Kevin, a product of the post-DADT American reality, meets his husband-t0-be in the United States Army. Among other protests, One Million Moms responded with a Toys R Us boycott. This may further demonstrate that the acceptability of homosexuality within a heteronormative context like Riverdale has very strict parameters. By crossing too many such parameters at once, Kevin went too far and angered groups, like One Million Moms, that are deeply invested in traditional, patriarchal notions of the family.

#111 Comics Coming of Age, Again and Again

smarsden — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 03:51:33 +0000

In my longstanding love of comics, I’ve collected books from across the variously defined “ages,” and each has its own particular and distinctive feel. The Golden Age, for example, was rife with morality, nationalism and pedagogy, heavy handed in these motivations. The Silver Age, by contrast, was predicated on slapstick and farce, reveling in the fantastic with little concern for continuity or realism, content just to offer singular stories of heroes that were more focused on comedy rather than content. The Bronze Age was marked by a moral, serious turn, with a leaning towards social issues and more realistic images, both in character representation and in environment. What followed, as recent hindsight has made us construct it, was the invention of the Copper Age, now generally understood to be the early 1990’s, that saw the advent of Image Comics, variant covers and a new focus on comics as collectible, physical media. Here comics were marked by landmark, continuity defining events in single issues and series-within-series (Death in the Family, X-Cutioner’s Saga, etc.). The age that we are now in is, of course, as yet undefined, being an age that is always keeping up with the present moment, always self reflexively on the cutting edge of what comics are evolving into as the ideal form of the medium. We often forget that ages are inventions that we ascribe to the past in order to rationalize it, to trace lines and force patterns where there are often none to be found. Defining anything in terms of “coming of age” is always a little uncomfortable, because it signals a backwards-looking acknowledgement that there was something juvenile about what preceded the current manifestation, where something comes into its own enough to be widely recognized for its validity. Comics, arguably more than any other medium, have been self consciously doing this from the moment of their inception in their struggle to be acknowledged as both a legitimate art form and as an appropriate means of delivering thoughtful narrative to a diverse readership. As critics, we are forever locked in our present moment when analyzing our texts, but in looking at the defining characteristics of the various ages of comics, we see that they “come of age” at least once a generation, becoming always the acme of what they were meant to be, asymptotically pursuing an ideal form; this happened previously in Neal Adam’s Green Lantern run, Morrison’s Arkham Asylum, and now Kirkman’s Walking Dead. The comics that we are looking at, at any given point in time, are always of the Modern Age, and because of this it’s difficult to understand them as anything other than an evolutionary process - particularly now, with the transition to digital comics, which will undoubtedly mark the coming of age of the next generation of the medium, full of hyperlinked asides and texts that employ multimedia in order to broaden their readerships. It’s not surprising that a medium that is predominantly used for coming of age narratives (Spider-man, Batman, Superman, nearly every hero in comics faces adversity in youth and overcomes it in adulthood) is so self-consciously trying to redefine itself in whatever age it finds itself in. It is insistent in addressing the cultural moment faster than any other medium, as we see in Michael Straczynski’s Spider-Man #36 (an emotional tribute to 9/11, published only a month after the event), Civil War as it responded to the Patriot Act in the United States, or even the forthcoming DC series The Green Team and The Movement that tackle the growing divide between the 99% and our oligarchs. There is always a need in comics to seem as relevant as possible, as responsive to readership as any text can be. This may simply be attributed to marketing, similar to the Victorian serials that would address critics as individual chapters were published, often adding characters and changing the structure of the stories in order to sell more copies. The serial does have a greater potential for change both in form and content, and we see comics taking advantage of this time and again in addressing the cultural markers of their eras, whether this is in having Superman tell us to "slap a Jap," (Action #58), with having Spider-Man pose on a cover with Barack Obama (ASM #583), with Superman employing the help of JFK to help protect his secret identity (Action #309) or with Batman trying to stop the murder of one of the Beatles (Batman #222). Comics is a transgressive medium that is constantly scrabbling after a validation and an adulthood that will never - appropriately – arrive. Because it is largely ignored in academic circles and treated as peripheral, it is forced into the younger brother position alongside the literary canon, constantly redefining and reasserting itself in its ability to offer more that its counterparts. However, this is a highly productive compartmentalization – as comics experiments with facets of its previous incarnations and struggles for recognition, it does so with a cautionless abandon that is difficult to see in any other medium. To say that comics have come of age would be both correct and incorrect; it would perhaps be more appropriate to say that they have come of this age, and will do so again and again as each contributor discovers new possibilities for the medium.

#112 Michel Rabagliati’s Paul à Québec – The Coming of Age of Quebec’s Everyman

hattiek — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 03:04:42 +0000

Michel Rabagliati has become one of Quebec’s most famous and well-loved creators of bandes dessinées. Author of the semi-autobiographical Paul series, Rabagliati has created a character that has been dubbed both Quebec’s Everyman and the Tintin of Quebec. Grandiose these claims may be, however they certainly demonstrate the dear place that Paul and his charmingly eccentric family have come to occupy in the hearts and minds of readers of Québécois Bande Dessinée (BDQ). Each of the albums in the Paul series takes a distinct period in Paul’s life and weaves together stories from his present with musings on the lives and history of his family. Previous topics have included the way in which he met his wife, his first job as a summer camp counselor and stories from when he and his wife first moved in together. More recently Rabagliati has tackled the difficult topic of Paul’s Father in law’s cancer diagnosis and his death in the touching book Paul à Québec. Paul à Québec marks a distinct change in both Paul as character and as series, the often light-hearted tales of Paul’s family and his childhood become rare as he dwells on the terminal illness of his Father-in-Law, Roland, and Roland’s life as a young Québécois man in a now long gone Quebec. By interweaving the tale of Roland’s youth with the story of his journey towards death, Rabagliati deftly crafted this modern day elegy that would be translated into English under the title of The Song of Roland. This album charts the coming of age of not only the young Roland, but also of Paul himself, Roland’s daughters and indeed the Paul series as a whole. Roland’s family are forced to react and grow in ways they had never thought possible as they live through Roland’s last months, weeks and days. Paul’s wife Lucie and her two strong willed sisters are pushed to work together to support their parents and each other and Paul himself is called to support his wife and sisters in law whilst reflexively musing on the new Roland that is becoming visible to him through Roland’s increasing confidences regarding his past. One of the most moving sequences in the book occurs towards the end where Roland finally says to Paul that he can use the informal “Tu” when he addresses him rather than the formal “Vous”. Meanwhile, on the wider level of the series, Rabagliati deftly tackles these difficult issues and ably demonstrates that this series is not merely the home of light and self-deprecating familial anecdotes but also a space in which Rabagliati can address the complexities of life. In the flashback sequences relating to Roland’s youth, we see him as a young, desperately poor Francophone in the Quebec of the mid twentieth century. Abandoned by his parents, Roland was taken in by the church and educated by them until such a point as it became apparent that he would not be seeking a career within their fold. After a period spent wandering the streets of Quebec, homeless and unemployed, a chance encounter with a shopkeeper whose bike he would have stolen leads to employment, and Roland's English skills see him swiftly promoted within his new employment. Meeting his wife, starting a family and pursuing a new career, first as a travelling salesman, then as an employee of a distribution firm all follow in quick succession and Roland soon finds his feet and goes on to become Executive Vice President of the distribution firm before his retirement. This story of a young man forced to grow up all too quickly upon his parents’ disappearance and his subsequent failures and then successes serves as a touching counterpoint to Rabagliati’s tale of his illness and the way in which he soon becomes defined by his status as patient rather than for his life’s achievements. It is also notable that Roland’s own coming of age runs in parallel with the period of intense socio-political and economic change that occurred within the province of Quebec during the 1960s which has come to be known as The Quiet Revolution. Without ever going into specific details, these sections do still offer insights into the realities of life during the 1950s and 1960s within the province. On the broader level of BDQ it is notable that Paul exists at all. Previous iconic figures within BDQ have tended towards the satirical or the subversive, specific examples include Bojoual le huron kébékois and Capitaine Kébec. Whilst BDQ is held to have its resurgence in the 1970s, with the so-called Springtime of Québécois Bande Dessinée, no definitive or iconic character emerged from these efforts to create a distinctly Québécois incarnation of the comic book form. Capitaine Kébec may still be used as a poster boy for BDQ, yet he, with his towel for a cape, cannot be considered of relative importance to BDQ as characters such as Tintin and Asterix are to Franco-Belgian BD. What Paul has given BDQ is their own figurehead, a character that stands as representative of BDQ as a distinctive comic book form. As David argued a few weeks ago comics might not ever come of age, but what Paul demonstrates is that BDQ has matured to the point where it is able to produce and sustain an iconic figurehead that is distinctly its own, similar to Tintin only in looks and the regard in which he is held. Paul à Québec not only documents the coming of age of its characters, but it also offers a glimpse of the intense changes that have marked the development of Quebec’s society and politics over the last 60 years. For Rabagliati and Paul as a series, this book demonstrated a distinct shift in tone and content, the series itself came of age and offered exciting and moving new riches to its readers while Paul as character stands as testament to a more confident BDQ that seeks to innovate rather than appropriate and subvert. Works Cited: Michel Rabagliati, Paul à Québec, La Pastèque, 2009

#113 What Will It Take To Seduce You? - Coming of Age in Geneviève Castrée's Susceptible

damon — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:36:49 +0000

As the least Canadian member of the Graphixia crew (being neither a national nor studying there) I felt it was about time that I came of age by writing about a Canadian comic about coming of age. I have been waiting eight years to read another work by Geneviève Castrée and last month I was finally able to get my hands on Susceptible, her latest book and a memoir about her childhood in Québec. I first came across Castrée’s work in Drawn & Quarterly Showcase in 2005. Each issue showcased three up-and-coming artists and Castrée was featured in issue three, alongside strips by Sammy Harkham and Matt Broersma. In the credits she is listed as Geneviève Elverum, her married name which she appears to have used only briefly. I initially picked up the book because I was fascinated by Castrée’s attractive and distinctive artwork on the cover. Inside, her dreamlike story ‘We’re Wolf!” begins as a meditation on depression before moving on to thoughts about love and our place in the world. It was the art that struck me first however, with meticulously detailed illustrations in fine-nibbed pen, and ink wash. There are rarely panel borders and often one image fills the whole page. Each page may have hundreds of tiny marks on it but it never looks cluttered, this is a strip that always feels spacious and delicate, both in illustration style and emotion.

The strip opens with a depressed girl reading a comic in bed, the book looks a lot like Tintin in Tibet. Later the pages blossom into life as she meets a boy riding the elephant that was originally a manifestation of her depression. They leave the elephant behind and climb into a snowy mountain landscape. The clear deliberate line work also brings to mind Hergé’s Himalayan adventure. Both characters resemble Castrée, creating a feeling that this work stems from autobiography. A double page spread blooms into bright colour and features the two characters surrounded by an intricate pattern of green leaf covered branches. In bright red circles in the corners of these pages Castrée writes, “What will it take to seduce you?” but the question is immaterial, I am already smitten. Despite falling for her work in a big way I found other books hard to obtain here in the UK. Castrée has released a few books with Montreal based publisher L'Oie de Cravan including book/LP packages. She also recorded drone/folk/pop music under the name Woelv and more recently, Ô Paon, and has stated that both drawing and music are forms of meditation to her. When I began to see the pre-publicity for Susceptible I was very excited but there was also a slight feeling of trepidation, what if the long wait had built my expectations up too high? I need not have worried; Susceptible is a beautiful book drawn from a childhood and adolescence filled with wonder and pain, and darkness and light. A coming of age story where the need to break free of one’s upbringing is imperative. As Castrée says at the end “I’m eighteen. I have all my teeth. I can do what ever I want” The book begins with Castrée (or Goglu as her character is named in the book) as a naked baby on an almost empty page. The narration is in Castrée’s characteristic neat yet intricate cursive text and discusses the topic of nature versus nurture. As Goglu grows older a plant beside her grows too, and as she ponders her depressive nature the plant slowly begins to entrap her. She struggles and eventually breaks free, we see her curled up and clothed and the text says “I have pulled myself so far away from my family that it is almost like I don’t belong to it anymore”. These four pages lay out themes of the book common to other coming of age stories; the feeling of being trapped by family, attempting to find one’s sense of self, and the desire to fly the nest. Susceptible details Goglu’s life until the age of 18, she lives with her mother Amère and her partner Amer. Everyone in the book is given a pseudonym and on initial reading I didn’t realise that these names translated as ‘bitter’ but that certainly describes these two. Amère was the youngest of 16 siblings and appears not to be able to handle being single. She is the opposite of Goglu who craves silence and solitude. Goglu’s father Tête d'Oeuf (great name!) left when she was two years old to go live at the other end of Canada in British Columbia “a mythical kingdom where dads go to disappear”. There is a very atmospheric double page spread as Goglu watches him leave from a second floor window. Outside it is night and raining heavily, and the only illumination is from the headlight of Tête d'Oeuf’s motorbike. Castrée draws precipitation beautifully. In the Comics Journal Harvey Pekar described Robert Crumb as having “a cartoony style, but his work, because of its wealth of accurately observed detail, is also realistic”, the same can be said about Castrée’s artwork. Clothes are meticulously striped or checked, furniture is painstakingly patterned and vehicles are realistically rendered. When she is 15 Goglu visits her father for the first time in 10 years and she begins to experience the freedom and space that she has been craving “I discover true solitude and I savour it”. The book touches on her experiences with drugs, sex and music as she begins to find her way in the world and moves towards the inevitable break from her mother. Amère makes a last attempt to stop Goglu leaving by suggesting they get an apartment together and when Goglu refuses she tries to make her feel guilty “well… you’ve abandoned me…”. Goglu can take no more and floats out of her shoes and through a hole in the white space of the page. In interviews Castrée has admitted to a problem that faces all autobiographical cartoonists, how do people feel about being depicted in the book? She confesses that the comic may upset her mother “I have this magical power to break my mom's heart”. Despite this and perhaps because she has not spoken to her mother for several years, Castrée felt that this was a story she had to draw. I am very grateful that she did. Works cited Castrée, Geneviève Susceptible. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2013. Elverum, Geneviève, Harkham, Sammy & Broersma, Matt Drawn & Quarterly Showcase Book 3: An Anthology of New Illustrated Fiction. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2005. Hergé Tintin in Tibet. Tournai: Casterman, 1960. Pekar, Harvey Blood and Thunder: Harvey Pekar and R. Fiore in The Comics Journal. Seattle: Fantagraphics [online] http://www.tcj.com/blood-and-thunder-harvey-pekar-and-r-fiore/ [Accessed 23^rd April 2013].

#114 What Does It Mean to Draw a Picture of Something? Comics, Art and Warren Craghead

wilkinsp — Wed, 01 May 2013 17:00:23 +0000

“In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array, something like those of the finest Italian line engreavings….In some instances, to the quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but afford the ground for far other delineations.” Herman Melville, Moby Dick In spite of a general effort to celebrate the visual aspect of comics as being their key feature, artists get the short end of the stick in mainstream commercial comics. Writers like Alan Moore, Ed Brubaker, and Neil Gaiman get lionized, while artists are celebrated, yes, but more as an accessory to the concepts of the “author”. Independent comics tend to celebrate the auteur: the complete artist who generates images in perfect harmony with his or her ideas. Pick your Hernandez brother. Or Jason. But even in these cases, logos tends to override image. See Charles Hatfield’s latest review of Gilbert Hernandez’ Julio’s Day and Marble Season. If you didn’t know Hernandez was a comics artist and didn’t see the images associated with the review, then it would take you a while to figure out that there was a visual dimension of the work. This is not to criticize Hatfield, who is one of the most skilled critics of comics. I just want to draw attention to the conceptual dominance of ‘story’ over picture in the discussion. While I admit to painting an overly simple picture here, it gives rise to the question of how certain comics artists who put drawing before storytelling challenge the notion that comics must tell a story supported by pictures. What if the picture came first, and the story came second? Arising from the image as it were, rather than preceding it? These are the kinds of questions that Warren Craghead asks. Craghead talks about his own work as trying to avoid the “cinematic” aspect of more mainstream comics, the feeling that one is looking through windows or frames at an unfolding story. Instead, he wants his drawings to come out at the viewer…to be objects in the world. To Craghead, a drawing is both a thing and a picture of a thing. The way I understand his work is to think of it as a perpetual questioning of what it means to draw a picture of something, incorporating a complex of mind, hand, technology, and external world. Craghead trained as a painter but has become a compulsive “pencil hound,” someone who draws habitually, experimentally, and humorously in search of the narratives that his art might generate rather than illustrate. That is, his drawings reach for something that he hasn’t yet thought of, even though they are frequently referential: you can spot dogs, surfers and formula one cars but also strange lines and shapes that you can’t identify. For instance, Craghead draws while driving (always paying attention to the road, he says), while watching television with his daughters, whenever he gets the chance, just to see what happens. One of his projects is to draw comics on Post-it notes and leave them stuck in various places in his world. Similarly, with Seed Toss Craghead sends drawings out into the world to see what happens to them. Maybe one will take root and grow while the others that shrivel up and become nothing. The exciting thing for Craghead is not knowing: each drawing is a lottery ticket, potentially with the right combination of numbers. In our discussion with Craghead and Simon Moreton in our Graphixia podcast, I asked what the connection was between their work: because Rob Clough in his Comics Journal piece on Moreton’s Smoo comics said that they reminded him of Craghead’s work, but I couldn’t see the relationship. Moreton’s comics seem to be the careful distillation of things, every lamp post in the street refined to an economy of line so as to require nothing more. Craghead’s comics, in contrast, look more like mad scribbling, as if there were not enough time to worry about the kind of refinement we see in Moreton’s work. This stop light only allows so much time for a drawing: better get it down as quickly as possible. You get the feeling that to slow down for Craghead would be to risk missing something. This feeling I have may just be an illusion. For all I know, Craghead agonizes over every mark and gesture. The real connection between the two artists is that each is coming at the question of what it means to draw a picture of something from a different angle. In the podcast, both artists talked about memory, place, and searching for something while not quite knowing what it is. In Moreton’s work, these terms create perhaps a mistaken sense of nostalgia; he’s not trying to capture the past or present it through rose coloured glasses, but to look for something in it that he can’t quite figure out. The urgency in Craghead’s work has the same effect, of tying to express something in the reaction between brain and manifest world with the movement of a pencil. Ultimately, Moreton and Craghead have a Romantic sense of what it means to draw a picture of something: what matters is not so much the verisimilitude in the representation of the thing as what the representation expresses about the artist’s mind in response to the thing.

#115 "Okay... this looks bad": Hawkeye and The Problem with Comics as Art

admin — Tue, 07 May 2013 21:55:10 +0000

What is art? It’s a question that loads everything we’ll be discussing in this space over the next five weeks or so. And, as with most questions with such a loaded pretence, it inevitably leads us to definitions. Definitions, by most practices, work through histories or precedences to scope out the variables and juxtapositions required to be precise about what it is one means. That nod to history—either acknowledgement of, or reaction to—is the first and most important factor in determining a definition for art that might serve a discussion of comics and their relationship to art (or Art). To this definition, I bring the most recent incarnation of Hawkeye. Written by Matt Fraction and drawn by David Aja, Haweye takes up the character first put out there by Stan Lee in Tales of Suspense 57 in 1964. Hawkeye has most recently been spotted in the Avengers movie and a brief cameo appearance in Thor. The point here is not to show that Hawkeye has been around a while or is still relevant, but to establish that the subject itself is not new. That distinction is an important one since what defines something is often difference—think Stan Lee’s characters as different than DC’s characters or the early nineties turn marked by Todd McFarlane’s work on Spiderman and Spawn. That said, what needs to be resisted at all costs in a discussion about comics and art is a comparison to something we might refer to as institutional art — think pictures of the naked Madonna with child or giant waterlilies or pastiche or blurry colours or Art Speigleman (I know that mention will kill him, but when you have travelling gallery shows, that’s saying something). Instead, we must first confront the work on its own terms within its own context. To this extent, Hawkeye is art. But what kind of art is it and how does it stand in relation to what we might call Art (intentional Speigleman pun there)? Aja references the history of comic art in a number of ways, but most relevant here are his allusions—primarily visual—to the work of Chris Ware. Ware has a characteristic style that alludes to his own sense of aesthetics— a set of principles that govern what he takes to be a worthwhile expression. He favours the intricate and the intimate; tends to treat the page as if it were a building or container for the representation of detached, dejected lives; focuses on expressive representations of the body with a slow, developing narrative, that emphasizes the minute spaces between motions. A few representative examples appear below.

Enter into this conversation Hawkeye. Aja captures Ware’s sense of the page, with its intersecting lines and narratives. The allusion is entirely clear to someone who has a knowledge of Ware’s work. The close-ups on the face, the slow-moving minutae of the body, the built-up page (in fact, the whole story in this issue takes place in Clint’s (Hawkeye’s) building.

This allusionary context is a marker for defining a developing, emerging, or established aesthetic. Ware’s style is being translated into another storyline through allusion both subtle and apparent—an institution, we’ll call it the Institution of Ware, is establishing itself. In fact, Aja may be playing on the pun of "cutting" the cords with a mentor, bringing the sometimes antagonistic relationship between practice and principle, hereditary and innovative into play. Seems simple enough: hang a picture by Aja from Hawkeye next to a page by Ware and boom, there you have it—Art and an aesthetic style to accompany it. That said, there are conflicting analytical principles at play here. The first is that Chris Ware writes and draws his work entirely whereas Hawkeye is a collaborative effort. In other words, we need to ask what part of the comic is art exactly? Is it the the writing, the drawing, the colouring, the text? Each of these functions has a distinct personality behind it. Moreover, the drawings by Aja certainly allude to Ware’s work, but then so does the colour-scheme. Note how Matt Hollingsworth mimics the style of these colour-schemes in Hawkeye, emphasizing the subtle variations in hue and tone, even the presence of red (see the early Hawkeye pages above and Clint's red hat). Is Aja guiding Hollingsworth and how does a collaborative effort stand in relation to a single-authored piece? Does Chris Eliopoulos not deserve credit for his fine lettering given the attention often given in aesthetics about typography and the designs for representing the word? In short, comics bring tough questions to bear on traditional concepts governing the definition of artistic practice and its accompanying aesthetic philosophies. Fact is, the question of comics’ relation to art is a moot one. It’s already over before it began. We’ll never know what the relationship is because we don’t really need to. It’s a fruitless exercise at this point; the history of comics is established enough that comics can be discussed within their own context in relationship to nothing but themselves. To open up that discussion, connecting Hawkeye’s covers with the work of Jasper Johns for instance, only dilutes the conversation we might be having about comics. Comics stand in relation to art like the internal combustion engine stands in relation to the steam engine: they may well be andecendants, but to think of them in this way does nothing to help us understand either. That comics are often a collaborative, usually repetitive, almost always recycled endeavour opens spaces for new conversations about the nature of the medium. These conversations must occur outside the already established aesthetic principles of artistic production in precisely the same way that a discussion of the steam engine must stand outside a discussion of an internal combustion engine. Comics are a multi-mediated and re-mediated form of practice and cultural production that can only be defined within its own contexts—a context that more than justifies its significance as the most relevant form of twenty-first century aesthetic practice—and that means it can’t be art or Art… or, mercifully, stand in relation to either. Works Cited: Fraction, Matt, David Aja, Javier Pulido. Hawkeye Volume 2: Little Hits (Marvel Now) (Issue 6). Marvel, 2013. Ware, Chris. Building Stories Pantheon, 2012.

#116 Sparse Art: Meditations on a Line-Drawn Life

Grayb — Wed, 15 May 2013 22:38:18 +0000

My favourite comic artists these days: Simone Lia; Brian Lee O'Malley; Chester Brown; Jeff Lemire; Sarah Leavitt. In webcomics I love Kate Beaton; xkcd; Dinosaur Comics. These are the artists and authors of the books I return to over and over again. Primarily line-based, these comics are more about simple, evocative line art than about the kind of full-colour, high detail comics I used to covet. The shift has been a marked one: I've gone from privileging the kind of sweeping epic imagery more common to big-2 comic series like Marvel Civil War and DC's 52 to a much more sparse, line-drawn style that is more typical of my readerly transition to slice-of-life graphic narratives. As I talked about a long long long time ago (issue 47!), I've been trying to privilege art over writing. And while I'd like to suggest that I've developed a kind of subtlety and delicacy in my reading of imagery -- that I now look for these simpler art forms because I can read more into them than I did before -- I think maybe that's not so. Many of the slice-of-life and autobiographical narratives I gravitate towards use more simplicity in the imagery than more traditional superhero comics. They make extensive use of blank space and rarely use colour. Lines are spare; explressions are subtle and nuanced. I can read a lot in a single panel of, for example, Sarah Leavitt's Tangles. God, so few lines but so much is evocative. This comes at the moment in the text when the narrator realizes that her mother is not all there -- this embrace, with the empty faces and the simply figures, suggests the absence that will soon be replaced by the knowledge of Alzheimer's and the progressive deterioration of the mother. The images blur here: which is the mother and which is the daughter? Who is being held? It's not clear. Both characters are scared and anxious; both are lost as they await news. And furthermore, this image illustrates an underlying anxiety in the comic that Sarah is her mother -- that their physical similarity will result in her also developing Alzheimer's, that she cannot escape this fate because they are one and the same. I feel pretty darn chuffed with myself for getting so much from a single image. I'm awesome! But I'm consciously choosing texts that force me to do this -- that offer up empty space ripe for analysis -- that ask me to put the pieces together. Am I really thinking less like an English Lit person, or am I simply finding texts that make it so I have a lot to "read" in the imagery and that invite me to do the kind of work I feel comfortable with? Because when I read a representative sample of Marvel Civil War, I excuse myself from any cognitive work in looking at the images. Why? Have I made some distinction between high and low comics -- those "literary" enough for visual analysis and those not? I suspect that that's exactly what I'm doing, and perhaps it's not entirely unreasonable and undeserved, but it requires that I question my understanding of how to read a comic. I'm going to start trying to apply some of the skills I've built on my slice-of-life comics to more traditional superhero narratives. I'm starting to learn that the art of reading comics is a process.

#118 Pascal Blanchet’s Nocturne: Comics, Art and Music.

hattiek — Tue, 28 May 2013 23:11:33 +0000

Nocturne: /ˈnɒktəːn/ noun 1 Music a short composition of a romantic nature, typically for piano. 2 Art a picture of a night scene. Before you start reading this, please do me a favour and put your headphones in and press play on the Youtube playlist below. All will become clear as the post progresses and if I ever meet you I might even buy you a gin for putting up with my nonsense. I am currently doing some fieldwork in the Bibliothèque et Archives Nationale du Québec (bear with me, I will get on to comics and art in a minute), and part of this involves reading a lot of comics, magazines, books and zines produced in Québec from 1976(ish) to the present day. Some of these have been brilliant, the magazine Croc for instance; is something I would like to return to in a future Graphixia posting. The Neverendum Colouring Book made me laugh a little bit. However there have been some low points as well. A particular low point came just last week when during two days in the library six out of the seven texts I requested from the stacks included some of the ugliest art work I have ever seen. And so, I turned to one of my favourite creators, Pascale Blanchet. Blanchet is an illustrator and comic book creator from Trois-Rivieres in Québec. Having worked as a professional illustrator his first comic was released in 2005. Blanchet’s work is that which I turn to when people I meet scoff at the idea that comics might be art (fortunately few and far between). Other than Michel Rabagliati he is also my most oft- recommended creator to those asking me questions about BDQ. His work might not have the edge and audacity of Julie Doucet’s oeuvre, nor the sketchy charms of Jimmy Beaulieu’s autobiographical comics, however his refined and elegant stories deftly transport you back in time and immerse you in a world of romance, swirling snow storms and stirring music.

Blanchet holds that his inspiration comes primarily from music, and it is for this reason that at the end of each book he includes a discography for the reader (“Aha!”*. See what I did there?). The music reflects the themes and subject matter of his book and listening to the music as you read the books creates an immersive experience that cannot help but transport you to the time and place of each book. For example ‘La Fugue’ is soundtracked by jazz classics, and ‘Rapide Blanc’ by the music of big band stars such as Artie Shaw, The Andrews Sisters and Bing Crosby, 'Nocturne's' soundtrack? Well you're listening to it now (I hope). ‘Nocturne’ tells the story of three lives, intertwined only through the music performed by one of the characters. The words of Cole Porter’s classic, ‘In The Still of the Night’ flow through the opening pages of the book as we meet their singer the beautiful, aloof and mysterious Anne Schaeffer. As we follow the words through the pages we meet first an unnamed author who has just received a letter of rejection for his manuscript and second a distracted waitress in a diner, Molly. The three never meet but their stories are brought together within the pages of ‘Nocturne’. We soon realize that for Anne’s all is not quite as perfect as it seems. Meanwhile the author argues with his girlfriend and the Molly receives shocking news from home. New York operates as another character within the pages of this book. However Blanchet has created a version of New York that belongs in a Woody Allen film or an Edward Hopper painting. Its dramatic skyscrapers dwarf Anne as she emerges from work, overwhelmed by her life. As the writer argues with his girlfriend on the banks of the Hudson the rain lashes down around them, and a storm batters the Greyhound bus in which Molly is rushing home. By choosing characters that seem like cultural archetypes, the beautiful waitress, struggling writer and weary artists, Blanchet only emphasizes the unreality of his tale. His art, story and soundtrack all work together to bring to life a New York that is cinematic, beautiful and soul destroying. Practically wordless, Blanchet lets his art drive the narrative forward. His art is deceptive in its simplicity, single or double page spreads are Blanchet’s standard format, and this large format allows the reader to savour the artwork and the beautiful details that Blanchet scatters through his pages. The occasional blank page paces the reader, forcing them to absorb details, such as the woven texture that can be seen underneath every image or the beautiful shadows that fall across the page. Almost all of the words in this book do not belong to the story; they are timetables and song lyrics, rejection letters from publishers and the perpetually chirpy commentary of radio DJs. His work is created either using Adobe Illustrator or Linocuts and calls to mind mid-century American art and design, and modernist works created by artists such as Lili Tschudi or Cyril E Power. Whilst Blanchet claims not to look at the work of other illustrators, he would find it too intimidating [1], he also holds that the largest influence on him, creatively, were the record sleeves he remembers from his childhood. It is certainly true that Blanchet’s books are reminiscent of the work of Jim Flora who designed multiple album covers in the 1940s and 1950s. The limited colour palette that he chooses for each album, in this case teal, gray, orange and black further reinforces the cinematic backdrop of New York and as more colours are added to his palette in the last few pages of the book, Anne and Molly’s renewed lease on life is subtly underscored. Blanchet’s comic pushes the reader to muse on what it means to be a successful artist. Anne Schaeffer is renowned and successful, yet she is clearly deeply unhappy. Meanwhile his author is unsuccessful to the point that publishers are recommending he follow another career in their letters to him. Come the morning Anne leaves her home and walks out on her life in search of a new one while the writer sits himself down at his typewriter and starts again. Blanchet’s nocturne questions ideas of art and the artist, fame and success and pushes into sharp relief the reality of New York in comparison with the idealized version so often seen elsewhere. Evidence of Blanchet’s own uncertain relationship with art is evident in his reproduction of artworks within the text. Where buildings are lovingly copied on the page, when it comes to recreating the statues and paintings that Anne passes on her way home Blanchet is less particular. Rather figures within artworks are loosely rendered, fading away at their extremities, often suggested rather than represented in the detailed way that Blanchet presents architecture. This does perhaps demonstrate the feelings of intimidation that Blanchet has admitted to. That is not to suggest that his style is in any way photorealistic elsewhere, it has however a certain sharpness and precision that is absent in his rendering of objects such as the sculptures on the Art Deco façade of the NBC building in New York. It would be easy to discuss Blanchet’s comics as art as you could probably take any single page from one of his books and hang it on your wall. But when I think about comics and art what comes to mind aren’t questions about artwork but rather musings on the relationships that exist between comics and other artforms. Other examples of this might include the way in which Eric Simon and Simon Bossé used the inspiration of Hubert Aquin’s ‘Prochain Episode’ to create ‘Hamidou Diop’ a comic that draws heavily on the tradition of Emblem Books. Or the way in which Julie Doucet joined forces with Michel Gondry to create ‘My New New York Diary’ a comic book and short film combination. Pascal Blanchet uses music to shape and guide not only his art but also his narratives, all the while forging a different and exciting kind of relationship between Comics and Art, which in this particular instance seems to perfectly unite both the musical and artistic aspects of the definition of the word nocturne. Works Cited: Pascal Blanchet - Nocturne, Les Editions de la Pasteque, 2011 Pascal Blanchet - Bologne, Les Editions de la Pasteque, 2007 *The playlist is the discography included by Pascal Blanchet in his 2011 graphic novel ‘Nocturne’. For most of the tracks I have managed to find the exact version included by Blanchet, in a few cases I have had to make substitutions or omit the track. I hope you’ve enjoyed the playlist so far and have time to listen to the rest of it, if you have access to Spotify then here’s a link to it on there - Graphixia #118 - Pascale Blanchet's Nocturne

[1] http://www.visualnews.com/2012/02/14/the-musically-inspired-work-of-pascal-blanchet/

#117 Words and Pictures: Art and Competing Visualities in Comics

smarsden — Wed, 22 May 2013 00:20:16 +0000

Referring to comics as “art” has long been problematic for a host of reasons – their mass production, their varied content and audience level, their lateness in arriving to the literary field and the canonical “Arts” on the whole. Most challenging to overcome, however, is the marriage of text and image that comics represents, and it’s a far more complicated dynamic than any other medium has faced. Comics are often compared to film because of the similar interplay between words and images, though the challenges that comics are actually wholly different: in film, the audience is presented with visuality and aurality, whereas in comics, the reader is presented with competing visualities, with text and image consistently attempting to usurp one another for dominance in delivering the narrative. This creates a sort of cognitive dissonance on the part of the reader, unsure of where the artistry in comics truly lies and unsure of how to engage with the art object itself. We see this tension erupt in a number of different ways in comics, notably in such conventions as the splash panel, where text is typically silenced (or kept to a noticeable minimum) in order to have a full page image supplant the dual pull on our attention. Here, we are offered a brief moment where we can access the art object in the conventional way, in that we are allowed to provide the context for ourselves. Images naturally beget a textual response in our minds as we mull them over, bringing our experiences and personal histories to bear on them despite the environment in which they’re encountered. With the presence of text, we are denied this natural response, interrupted in our efforts by the constant push and pull between author and artist, between allowing the images to naturally form cognitive responses and allowing the text to do the exact opposite. Reading comics is challenging because it causes us to fuse these binaries, making the experience multiple in ways we are rarely cognizant of. As Scott McCloud notes, there is a “visual vocabulary” in comics (and indeed in all art) that makes us react to images in particular ways and draw unconscious associations from them, and the apprehension that we feel when this internalized vocabulary encounters the printed word can be palpable. The appropriately named “virgin cover” - an oft employed convention in long running serials where all text (title, author, even UPC code) is removed in order to solely let the image speak for itself - is another example of comics’ way of acknowledging the tension between text and image, forcing the reader to frame the image himself without the aid of any authorial description. Alex Ross’ painted variant virgin cover for Star Wars #1 demonstrates the power that an image can take on when denuded of all of the details of publisher, artist name, even price when trying to engage comics as art. Compare it then, side by side, with its counterpart, fettered with titles, tagline and publication details. Which cover, pictured left and right, more closely represents that ambiguous term “art”? An example of this relationship can be further seen in Joseph Michael Linsner’s several “Dawn” miniseries, in which each panel is painstakingly hand painted despite the advent of technologies that could do the work for him. If the big A “Art” could be found anywhere in comics it is here, as Linsner rehashes religious themes mixed with fantasy and myth, drawing inspiration from Franzetta in alternating between pastels and oils and providing rich imagery to accompany his text – it’s significant to note that he also has employed alternate virgin covers in allowing the reader a different type of access to his work than comics typically allows. His images are lush and lavishly textured, each issue taking months to produce. Despite the obvious craft that goes into even the smallest panel in “Dawn,” however, it is still marketed as comics instead of as art directly. Interestingly, however, Linsner’s publisher Image Comics also produces full size, more conventional volumes of Linsner’s work titled “The Art of Joseph Michael Linsner” – here, we see Linsner’s paintings in full page spreads (often the reproduced covers of his individual issues) with no text at all except for the occasional appending paragraph discussing the motivation behind an individual piece. It appears, at least in this case (though there are many others, including the superlative work of Dave McKean and Adam Hughes), that we are more comfortable labeling art as such only when it is unaccompanied by textual content, when the images are the sole offering and are allowed to speak entirely for themselves. There is a single case in which comics are, in the industry, consistently referred to as art, and that is when one is trying to acquire an original page from which all others were produced. Collectors of “original art” in comics similarly divorce the original textual context from the drawings themselves, collecting particularly provocative pages removed from the storyline as a whole, removed even from the plotlines of the individual issues of which they ultimately became only a part. There is something Benjamin-esque in this, in attempting to catch the aura of a work surrounding its original production prior to its mass production on the newsstands. Pages of original art are often stained, sketched over with blue pencil, handwritten in the margins with editorial notations – they are the least polished versions of the final product, and yet they are sought after as art far more than their reproduced descendants. The monetary value of these pages also mirrors that of what we would commonly call art, even moreso in the age of digital reproduction, often fetching thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars for a single page. Art, then, is here again tied to our traditional concerns with valuing a work wherein we provide the context for the image instead of having it provided for us through text or narrative. There’s something ineffable about accompanying text that makes us not necessarily devalue the art object but value it differently, in terms that perhaps society has yet to define. Perhaps the blending of image and text creates a new, transcendent art form as we struggle to adapt to the competing visual representations of storytelling juxtaposed with our own stories intertwined, making sense of the images in tandem with having them made sense for us. It is in this liminal space, though, that comics become the most engaging, playing to and against our expectations of literature as art and “art” as art.

#119 The Hands of a Master: The Art of Jaime Hernandez

damon — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 07:27:03 +0000

So, my plan to write about the connections between comics and fine art went out the window. I was going to talk about Picasso’s love of The Katzenjammer Kids, the links between Philip Guston, Robert Crumb and Öyvind Fahlström, and the more recent phenomenon of artists, such as Olivia Plender, using comics as the medium for their work. But the ‘best-laid schemes o' mice an' men, Gang aft agley’ as a famous Scotsman once said, and the greatest comic book writer/artist in the world was coming to the UK to do a talk. [caption id="attachment_2785" align="aligncenter" width="614"] Love & Rockets #21[/caption] I wouldn’t make an 800 mile round trip for just anybody you understand, but Jaime Hernandez (or Xaime as he signs his work) visited London last week for the first time in 25 years. THIS WAS NO SMALL BEANS PEOPLE! Along with his brother Gilbert, he has been producing the comic Love & Rockets in various formats for 30 years (with occasional contributions from older brother Mario). As I mentioned in Graphixia #100, the cover to Love & Rockets issue 24 is my favourite ever. [caption id="attachment_2786" align="alignleft" width="231"] Love & Rockets #24[/caption] To look at a Jaime Hernandez comics page is to catch a glimpse of perfection. His artwork appears effortless but has evolved over the years; he mentioned that he gradually did away with hatching (along with the sci-fi trappings of his early stories) to leave the pages with clean lines and blocks of black and white. He is a master of chiaroscuro and admitted to preferring not to work in colour. I haven’t seen a page of his original art but the reproductions in The Art of Jaime Hernandez show them to be very close to the printed comics, with very little pencils or whiteout visible. The Comica talk took place at the Institut Français as part of the Bande Dessinée & Comics Passion weekend. Jaime stopped off on his way to an appearance at Copenhagen Comics festival. He was interviewed by Woodrow Phoenix, also a man with a long history in comics and creator of the very fine book Rumble Strip. It was a long interview and Phoenix allowed Jaime to talk in depth, although his questions came from the perspective of a Love & Rockets aficionado and might have baffled any newbies in the audience (although one of the people I was with was new to L&R and he went out and bought Maggie the Mechanic the next morning!). The latter part of the interview was a live talk and draw in which Jaime’s drawing pad was projected on the huge cinema screen behind him. This provided an excellent opportunity to see his drawings blown up to gigantic proportions. Personally, I love seeing comic art at ridiculously huge sizes; it changes the way we see the art and makes it into something new. As we shuffled into the auditorium the screen was showing the classic panel from Love & Rockets issue 21 with Hopey’s band La Llorona on stage and the singer Monica berating the hecklers with the immortal line ‘If you were really hardcore, you'd have thrown a full bottle.’ A line so good Jaime also uses it as his bio on Twitter. [caption id="attachment_2782" align="aligncenter" width="614"] Jaime Hernandez at the Institut Français 30th May 2013[/caption] One thing the talk and draw proved (as Phoenix pointed out), was that Jaime can’t talk and draw at the same time! When giving a long answer he tended to stop drawing but we were then treated to the sight of his very expressive hand movements projected onto the cinema screen. Unfortunately some comments from the audience were boringly predictable; the first question was about Maggie’s weight, a tedious topic that was surely put to bed 25 years ago. When asked what he should draw, the first request was for Penny Century, the glamorous pin-up and wannabe superhero from Jaime’s Locas strips. I would have preferred a drawing of H.R. Costigan, her horned billionaire husband. After a session that ran over 2 hours in length, Jaime then graciously agreed to do a signing and about half the cinema gathered in a very orderly queue to get their books signed. I had a brief chat with Jaime as he signed my 1980s Titan Books editions of his work (with great covers designed by Rian Hughes) and wished him well for his trip to Copenhagen. Jaime came across as one of the sweetest, modest and generous folks that you could hope to meet and I look forward to following his stories for many years to come. [caption id="attachment_2851" align="aligncenter" width="614"] Woodrow Phoenix interviewing Jaime Hernandez[/caption] I used my fleeting London visit to seek out other comics events. The Roy Lichtenstein show at the Tate had closed (someone else who likes comics panels blown up huge) but the response show at Orbital Comics was still on. Image Duplicator was an interesting exhibition featuring work by Rian Hughes, Dave Gibbons and other cartoonists, illustrators and designers. Their work ‘re-reappropriated’ the original comics panels that Lichtenstein used in his work. The main difference with these works was that they credited the original artists, something Lichtenstein failed to do. I also managed to catch Sarah Lightman’s exhibition The Book of Sarah: A Life in Drawings and Animation Films at the Occupy My Time Gallery in Deptford. This was a great show featuring work from Lightman’s ongoing autobiographical project The Book of Sarah, due to be published in 2015. Her pencil drawings dwell on the everyday details of unhappy experiences, making them into beautiful art. She studied at The Slade School of Art and initially struggled with where her work fitted into the art world. I chatted to Sarah in the gallery about comics, autobiography and art, and she mentioned how, as she slowly discovered comics, her work began to make sense. She is also a tireless promoter of life narrative comics and co-founded Laydeez do Comics with Nicola Streeten. [caption id="attachment_2778" align="alignleft" width="213"] Sarah Lightman In Memoriam[/caption] Lightman’s art has a lot of space in it and the pencil marks are obvious and deliberate, you can see what the drawing was made with, unlike Jaime's work with its solid blacks with no sign of brushstrokes. Even when reproduced in a different medium, such as the films Lightman makes of her work, the materiality of her pencil shines through. This is very deliberate and Lightman also spoke about showing the work respect, the drawings were beautifully presented in frames in the gallery space. I wondered whether there was a definitive version of the work, drawings, comics or film. I really enjoy this multi-media playing around with the comics form and I am fascinated to see artists embrace site-specific comics. Like Olivia Plender, Lightman is an artist who happens to use comics as the medium to present her work. So there you go I still managed to talk about comics and art!

#120 Comics & The Multimodal World - An International Conference

damon — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 14:31:05 +0000

With our partners at The Comics Grid, everyone at Graphixia is very excited to be hosting our first conference starting tomorrow. Scholars from around the globe will convene in Vancouver on Thursday 13th of June for the launch of Comics & the Multimodal World. The multidisciplinary conference, hosted by Douglas College in New Westminster, B.C., examines how comics intersect with digital culture, multimodal narrative, internationalism, information design, and alternative literacies. The conference will feature student workshops, community forums, comics practitioners, booksellers, academic paper presentations, and two keynote lectures by Sarah Leavitt and Bart Beaty on Friday and Saturday evening. We are also very proud to be launching an exhibition of comic art at the Amelia Douglas Gallery (running until June 28). Curated by Allan Haverholm, Sequential Investigations: The New Comics features drawings, comics, and installations from an international group of comics artists including Warren Craghead, Simon Moreton, Sophie Yanow, Julie Delporte and many more. You can register for these events if you are a community member or student. You can also register for the conference at special rates if you are a community member, student in the Lower Mainland of B.C. or a member of the Douglas College community. We hope to see you there!

#121 Comics and the Multimodal World: The Conference That Was

wilkinsp — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 04:20:57 +0000

From Thursday, June 13 through Sunday, June 16, in partnership with the Comics Grid, Graphixia held its first conference (view the conference website here) at Douglas College in New Westminster British Columbia. As the conference approached, I began to dread it; I have never been so anxious in my life. Because we decided to put on an art exhibiton to augment the conference (thanks to the efforts of Allan Haverholm), I spent the day before the conference rushing around town, looking for the right kind of foam board on which to mount the art, getting the digital prints printed, and hanging the art in the Amelia Douglas Gallery. I did this not by myself, mind you, but alongside Hattie Kennedy, Damon Herd, David N. Wright, Liz McCausland, and Art Rhodes–the man from the College whose job is fittingly to hang art. Still, even with everyone working so hard, it did not seem possible that we would be able to bring this event off successfully. There were too many loose ends and things undone. Fortunately, the people who come to conferences see only what’s there, not what is missing, and once we were underway, many of my nerves subsided. We warmed up everyone at the conference with casual conversational sessions on general themes on the Thursday. These free-flowing discussion set the tone for the conference because they included the kind of stuff people talk about late at night in the bar at conferences. There was a real cameraderie among presenters, who came from Canada, The US, the UK, and Australia. Ernesto Priego, the editor in chief of the Comics Grid arrived at 1:00 am on Thursday from Mexico City via Toronto! The presenters were a great bunch: participatory, intellectually generous, and gracious. The final discussion of Thursday, a forum on comics and the digital humanities (listen to it here), treated the audience to a stunning conference version of Kraftwerk: four men with their macbooks lined up in front of the audience, each offering insight into the curious connection between these subjects. What really worked well were the workshops led by Damon Herd, Roger Whitson, and Ian Horton. Each in its own way could claim to be the conference highlight. These sessions focused not just on listening but on doing. Damon had us evaluate some strips he had drawn to make us reflect on on fact and fiction in autobiographical comics and the pact between the artist and reader. Damon charmed the audience with his strips and his challenge to figure out which one was “untrue” and why. Roger talked about how comics can introduce multimodality to composition classes and had people get in pairs to script a collaborative project that would would involve making comics. Held on the Friday afternoon, Roger’s talk (listen to it here) was perhaps the climax of the conference, thanks to good attendance and his energetic, engaging style. Ian discussed the complexities of infocomics while also showing their history in children’s periodicals such as Look and Learn and World of Wonder. He then had each of us create an infocomic on the history of Vancouver derived from Wikipedia, and photographed the results. I had seen Ian present elsewhere and was really glad to have him at this conference because I admire his ability to draw out ideas in a way that I can only describe as tactful: his respect for the material he examines generates his insight. The keynotes from Bart Beaty and Sarah Leavitt (watch Sarah's talk here) were both excellent, and both speakers did more at the conference than simply show up for their talk and leave; they attended other sessions and participated fully. Beaty spoke about Comics vs Art and the incursion of comics into the gallery and performance space through connections with other arts, like music, sculpture, and dance. Not everyone I spoke to agreed with Bart’s vision of comics becoming art, but there was a universal sense of it being a great talk. Sarah Leavitt conducted a workshop on turning life experiences into comics and gave a keynote about the production of Tangles her graphic memoir about dealing with her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s disease. Sarah’s talk was difficult for some in the audience because her experience with her mother reflected their own traumas with ailing and dying loved ones. Sarah leavened the talk, though, with humour and sensitivity. She is not only a great artist and storyteller but a fabulous speaker. This was the first conference I had attended that used video streaming for a paper presentation, a practice that is increasingly common. Lise Tannahill, in her first ever conference paper, gave a great presentation from Glasgow on identity in Becassine. With graduate students strapped for conference funding, I predict many more such presentations in the future. On the one hand it’s great that they be able to present, but on the other, being at conferences in flesh and blood is crucial to the experience. Another highlight was the final day’s round table reflection on comics, art and training (listen to it here), during which we discussed how comics production and coding were similar; the fact that comics were emblematic of a larger multimodal literacy required in the 21st Century; and the age-old problems of race and gender in the closed-off community of the comics shop. Brenna Clarke Gray, a core Graphixian, was able to join us from the Douglas College field school in Wales, which was important, because we missed her during the rest of the conference. Unfortunately, Scott Marsden was unable to join us, as he was home celebrating his first ever fathers’ day. Students, faculty, and staff from Douglas College attended the conference and engaged fully with the presenters. Of course, I had hoped that hundreds of students would turn out, but I was extremely happy that those who did attend were so up for participating in the conference. And the conference really came together on Twitter. Ernesto Priego created this archive of tweets that used the #graphixia13 hash tag (see the tweets here). It shows that Comics and the Multimodal World generated over 2000 tweets that included summaries of what speakers were saying, critical commentary and reflection, photographs and drawings. The Aboriginal Gathering Place at Douglas College was the main venue for panels and workshops. What an incredible place it is, and many of the international visitors commented on it. We are very grateful to Dave Seaweed at the College for allowing us to use it. It is not simply a classroom or a conference room, but a sacred space. As the conference drew to a close, the dread that had preceded it had given way to excitement for the future. My co-organizer, David N Wright, tweeted “What next?” to me on Sunday evening. And by the time Monday hit, we were trying to decide whether the next conference should be at Douglas College or somewhere else in the world: Graphixia14: Comics and the Global Humanities in London and Graphixia15: Comics and the Archive in Mexico City seemed like realistic possibilities. If those come to fruition, it will have been quite something to have held the first Graphixia conference at Douglas College in New Westminster.

#122 Anthropomorphism and Allegory in Renee French's Micrographica

wilkinsp — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 03:05:09 +0000

“There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.” Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human I’m no expert in anthropomorphism in comics and its history, but I suppose it is pretty much co-extensive with “funny animal” comics, like Carl Barks’ Donald Duck and Dave Sim’s Cerebus. For me the most satisfying comics with anthropomorphic animal characters are those that Jason produces. His mournful humanoid dogs and birds seem all the more human for their non-human characteristics. This de- and re-humanizing links anthropomorphic comics to fables, the allegorical stories that substitute animals for humans as a means of enhancing the stories’ parabolic nature. Using animals in human situations means that the fable represents a general case rather than a specific instance of human behaviour. The substitution de-historicizes a story so that it can have a moral that applies to the ages and to all peoples; hence the critique of such stories as ahistorical and acultural: falsely neutral. But when an animal fable is overtly historical, like Orwell’s Animal Farm, the conversion from human to animal seems pointless. I’m sure they made us read it in high school because connecting the dots is so easy. I prefer something like Melville’s Moby-Dick, though it is only partly an animal fable, that manages to provide a specific historical critique of slavery, whiteness, and power while also tilting at universal concepts. But this aside is taking me too far from comics, where anthropomorphism means allegory, unless it is just a gimmick. Renee French really tests the line between allegory and gimmick in Micrographica. She drew the panels for this comic in one centimetre squares, which she then blew up for publication. This method of drawing comics gives rise to the question of whether we ought to do something just because we can do it. My answer, in French’s case, is yes because of the way her play with the relationship between small and big goes beyond gimmicky constraint to address the issue of allegorical thinking. At the Comics and the Multimodal World conference last week, Roger Whitson introduced the concept of “distant reading” as opposed to the “close reading” that dominated thinking about literature in the mid- to late-twentieth century. Distant reading asserts that large patterns are as important as small ones; it strikes me that the idea is a kind of fractalism. In any event, by working in such a confined space, which limits how much information she can put in her drawings, French must deal with “big picture” ideas. In Micrographica, these ideas are ownership, friendship, and belonging. French seems wants to get at the most basic pleasures and fears that constitute a person, a masculine person at that, as the book deals almost entirely with homosocial structures. The book features four rodents (the consensus seems to be that they are naked mole rats, but I can’t see any confirmation in the text), a crap ball and the caterpillar-like creature within it, a sandwich, a human corpse, a glove, and a mountain. Preston and Moe have the kind of antagonistic friendship we might associate with teenaged boys. They harangue and humiliate each other incessantly with farts and “your mom” jokes. Preston is the needier partner, who needs to assert that the crap ball belongs to him, its initial discoverer. The crap ball is Preston’s treasure, validating him as a worthwhile individual. But Moe gets the upper hand on Preston by not caring–his detachment does the same thing for him as the crap ball does for Preston. The “mom” jokes Preston and Moe direct toward each other give the book an object relations angle, with the crap ball being a kind of surrogate maternal object: it even contains a living being! There are no father references, interestingly enough, but if we wanted to get really far out, we could consider the obviously male human corpse that Moe and Preston crawl over and into as the symbolic dead father. For them the body is just a thing with no individuality or personality. These are post-oedipal mole rats, finding their way in the world as independent beings yet craving meaningful attachment. Moe and Preston are continually fending each other off and drawing each other closer as they try to figure out what is more important: their connection with each other or their individual power in the world. No matter how much Preston and Moe harrass each other, they are a team. Their squabbles are like those of an old married couple. Aldo, meanwhile, is on the outside looking in, doing whatever he can to ingratiate himself with the other two. He offers them part of a sandwich he has found, his generosity counterbalancing Preston’s need to keep his crap ball to himself. When the crap ball that Moe and Preston have left in Aldo’s care breaks, Aldo goes on a quest for more crap to replace it. Aldo, it seems, will do anything to purchase acceptance, sacrificing individual power for a belonging that never arrives. The irony here is that absence of belonging creates a kind of independence that no one wants. French suggests that the homosocial condition is that individual power requires belonging so as to have someone else to boss around. The fourth character, Nubbins, acts as the figure of allegory itself. He directs Aldo on his quest for more crap to replace the broken crap ball, giving him the delusion that more crap equals more likelihood of belonging. However, Aldo makes a Kafka-esque mistake. Consider the following Franz Kafka parable, “On Parables”

Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: “Go over,” he does not mean that we should cross over to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least. All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter. Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid yourself of all your daily cares. Another said: I bet that is also a parable. The first said: You have won. The second said: But unfortunately only in parable. The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.

Aldo confuses the literal and the figurative, the real and the parabolic, as he is unable to see the “mountain of crap” for what it is. Renee French’s Micrographica is the comic book equivalent of the great literary parables. In it, small becomes big, crap becomes treasure, and significance emerges from the complex permutations we can generate from its simple elements. Does it matter that this parable is acted out by naked mole rats: hairless, helpless creatures scrabbling around with balls of crap? That’s for each reader to decide. Works Cited French, Renee. Micrographica. Marietta: Top Shelf, 2007. Kafka, Franz. "On Parables." Parables and Paradoxes. New York: Schocken, 1975.

#123 Hawkeye #11: Anthropomorphic Skeuomorphisms

admin — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 05:56:00 +0000

Anthropomorphism defines the practice of making things that are inhuman seem human. But what happens when artists exploit the inhuman to tell a story about the nature of humanity, highlighting the opacity of our behaviour, both toward each other and toward others? At the same time, anthropomorphism has increasingly become a synonym for skeuomorphism–that of making something so that it resembles another material or technique. The “gesture” controls of the full screen smart phone for example exhibit elements of skeumorphic design while at the same time, beneath the layers lies the anthropomorphic voice of Siri. Into the environment walks the much already praised Hawkeye #11. Hawkeye and the questions it raises about art have already been discussed in this space, but the much anticipated arrival of issue #11 called for another take on the comic and the way it rebounds off our cultural climate. Affectionately called the “Pizza Dog Issue,” Hawkeye #11 features an entire narrative from the dog’s perspective as he disentangles a recent murder. As close to a wordless comic as mainstream comics is likely to get, the issue features no written words except those a dog might understand. Matt Fraction, David Aja, and Matt Hollingsworth take the style of anthropomorphism and totally ignore it. While there are certainly instances in which Pizza Dog imitates human elements, the reader is entirely in the dog’s world as s/he deciphers the evolving narrative (there’s a whole other post on the relevance of the detective narrative here, but no time). Gone are the allusions to Mickey Mouse, or the clever asides that might arise if Pizza Dog were given the opportunity to express himself using a language more familiar to humans. In short, the reader is put in the position of figuring out that “Timmy is down in the well” as Pizza Dog deciphers the guilty parties in the crime. What interests me more than the narrative itself and even the acknowledged skill in rendering the story without the crutch of anthropomorphism, is how the issue reflects the relationship between comics, particularly in a design sense, and the mobile, interconnected, internet world we live in. We’re all very familiar with skeuomorphic design even if we have no idea what it is. The most obvious place we find it is on our electronic devices, where digital spaces are given flashes that make it more palatable as a real-world object. Apple's Calendar app, with its discrete torn paper shreds at the top is a classic example: In the same way that the panels in comics imply movement across time and space, the skeuomorphic design of digital environments suggests that those environments are in some way “real” objects, or belong in the catalogue of real objects that we understand. It’s not a multi-layered structure of written code read by a microchip that turns on and off relays according to binary code; it’s a calendar like we have on our desk. Comics are not a series of broken and disjointed images put into a sequence–a sequential narrative–they are a commentary on lives lived as you our I might wish. In short, we recognize both spaces as familiar to us and what we experience in the world. Of course, neither of the spaces–the calendar or the comics–are a true simulacrum of the world, but it’s close enough. What’s interesting about Hawkeye #11 is how it transposes the above comforting elements of anthropomorphism and skeuomorphism onto a story told by a dog. The reason we embed elements of the real world in our computer design is so that we don’t freak out and wonder what the hell-alien thing we are looking at is supposed to do–it’s a calendar; I understand that. Anthropomorphism is the same: when the dogs, cats, mice, pigs, horses, cows, hurricanes, and HAL2000 computers talk to us or feel what we feel, we can relate; they are us. The real strength of Hawkeye #11 is the way it forces us to reconsider how we understand our world or, better, how other things might understand our world. To Pizza Dog, we’re a jumble of scents, accents, and food scraps that signal love, distance, abuse and stupidity. That Pizza Dog maintains his dogness in the story is the highest form of flattery, despite what one might say about how Fraction, Aja, and Hollingsworth interpret the life of a dog (unfortunately the dog didn’t write it). The flip into a dog’s world forces the reader to perform interpretive acts in much the same manner that one imagines a dog would have to; we’re slowly piecing things together until we figure out that this two-legged thing who feeds us wants us to get the damn ball. We’re all dogs sniffing our way through the fire-hydrants in the narrative Pizza Dog is walking us through. As is frequently the case with the creative team behind Hawkeye, the most interesting point of contact with the story comes from its representation. It’s also where the skeuomorphic comes back in. There’s clearly been a conscious choice here to represent the dog’s sensory input through iconography. The image-squares in the comic illustrate the mental workings of Pizza Dog, telling us what he’s thinking, what he hears, smells, tastes, remembers. How the design of Hawkeye #11 reflects the interface most of us have with the modern world is really its highlight. The comic is a series of icons in the format familiar to those of us who own and use smartphones daily–the rounded corners of the image-squares, the consistent iconography, the clean, associative connections between icon and thing or action. I can only wish that my phone’s homescreen looked as slick as the above page. But, it says something more that the creative team has chosen to use this design sense over others to represent Pizza Dog’s inner workings. They’ve chosen a familiar setting for most of us, one that sees our thumb gently press on squares to call up skeuomorphic representations of our world–calendars, maps, mail. The rub is that this world is now being utilized by the anthropomorphic thoughts of a dog. The whole mashup clearly illustrates how interrelated the design functions of comics are with those common to the internet and the mobile / digital environments that bring that internet to us in a recognizable and usable format. That Pizza Dog’s thoughts are coming to us through icons and image sequences over language signals a decisive shift in what exactly makes us comfortable when representing things that are normally obscured. What Hawkeye #11 does is make us look more closely at our homescreens, our apps, our dashboards, our desktops, to see how they are, in effect, comics. These digital spaces are sequential narratives that are unique to each of us who use, understand, and organize them; they make us comfortable as we record, interpret, and participate in the virtual world. Anthropomorphism need no longer refer to instilling human elements onto an inhuman thing. Fraction, Aja, and Hollingsworth have shown us how comics, and the digital design strategies that come from them, are the new common language, one detached from the utterance but born from the gestured swipe across an empty gutter.

#124 Encounters With Animals: Revealing our Humanity Through Anthropomorphic Comics

smarsden — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 20:24:42 +0000

Anthropomorphism has a rich history in comic books, though we may not immediately be cognizant of this fact – most of our classic heroes are imbued with the traits of animals (Spider-man, Batman), and the tradition has continued through to the Bronze and Modern Ages in characters like Wolverine and Animal Man, newly repopularized in the superb Jeff Lemire series. Characters with animal qualities are legion, however so are those who are actually speaking animals themselves: Gorilla Grodd, the Flash’s telepathic and genius nemesis; the laser toting Rocket Raccoon from Guardians of the Galaxy (who will be amazing to see in this summer’s upcoming eponymous film); the drunk and depraved Howard the Duck; and Killer Croc from the various Batman series to name a few. There are even animal Green Lanterns, being the dog-creature G’nort and the squirrel Ch’p, who are presented as equally heroic and willful as any of their humanoid teammates. Similarly, we’ve recently been given a Red Lantern cat, Dex-Starr, whose powers derive from rage instead of will – an interesting amplification of the hostility we feel from the creatures most of the time. Animals without speaking roles are common as well, and I’m reminded of Ace the Bat-Hound, Krypto the superdog, and arguably the most fun: the unnamed cat from Justice League Europe who, with a camera implanted in its eye, worked as an unwitting spy against the team. Side stories were told from its own perspective, including unreadable world balloons since cats, of course, can’t understand English. Comics are, at their core, fascinated with animals, and there is hardly a series that does not approach them in some way. Some have argued that this is because we’re not creative enough in imagining our superior selves, and the most common powers that we fantasize about having (flight, strength, speed) stem from what we’re most familiar with in the natural world, whether the general readership is aware of this quality in comics or not. Others argue that it’s a hangover from the days of Aesop, where the allegory of the animal is the path of least resistance when attempting to generate larger moral statements on the nature of humanity. I’m more of the mind that we employ animals in comics because we inherently realize the limitations of our human forms and are constantly seeking alternate means of rationalizing our worlds through means that, while unrealistic, have some semblance of plausibility – animals allow us to think beyond ourselves in ways that have been presented as specious in most media, from Wells’ Island of Dr. Moreau to Cronenberg’s The Fly, resulting in fascinating storytelling and fantastic worlds that are not so surreal as to ostracize us from participation within them. Despite the overwhelming presence of animals in comics, however, few series point to it explicitly as motivation. There appears to be a passive acceptance of this convention in comics that is rarely expounded upon overtly. This said, while mainstream comics have accessed the animal in various ways, there remain standout series that have indeed openly reveled in the anthropomorphic to very interesting and innovative ends. Albedo Anthropomorphics, published by Thoughts and Images in 1983, was one of the earliest series to do this, inspiring a number of “furry” series that followed in Critters, Furrlough and Genus among others. The series was most noted for the introduction of Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo, a samurai rabbit in a carefully constructed and historically accurate feudal Japan populated by talking cats, pandas, foxes and dogs. Throughout the series, the only constant was the animals themselves, as stories shifted between accessing the distant past to the remote futures of speculative fiction, all while maintaining an adult tone and thematic content, primarily exploring issues of gender, loyalty and responsibility. Albedo quickly became a cult phenomenon and was picked up by the larger publisher Antarctic Press in several incarnations over the years, the most recent being in 2005. What was most intriguing about Albedo Anthropomorphics was how un-anthropomorphic it was while highlighting, even in its title, its ultimate focus. The stories appearing in the series visually represented all their characters as animals while totally ignoring this in the actual dialog. If one were to simply read the scripts for the stories, there would be nothing to indicate anything feral or anthropomorphic at all. While the medium to this point had emphasized the conjunction of animal and human in ways that were blatantly designed to direct our imaginations along predictable and particular (though sometimes peculiar) guidelines, Albedo upset this standard by drawing a distinct line between the two concepts, showing how the animal in comics could be utilized in an entirely different way – not for highlighting particular powers, or improving upon our collective human condition, but to radicalize storytelling more generally. The animals in Albedo appear apparently solely for aesthetic purposes, however they have inspired an entire subgenre of comics with a large readership that is based on this disconnect between image and text. What’s most fascinating about the interplay is that there is actually no interplay at all, save for any connections that the reader brings with them when engaging with the text. The result is a surrealist reworking of the genre, creating a cognitive disconnect that rears its head in unexpected places. How do we rethink traditionally human concepts like faith, love and honor when these are delivered by inhuman creatures? Perhaps the most well known of the expressly anthropomorphic genre of comics is Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a series that, while having since turned to cartoonish stories aimed primarily at a children’s audience, began as a thoughtful exploration of Japanese culture and Eastern mysticism. A surprising success, dating back to nearly the same month as Albedo was first released, TMNT began with an origin story that retained the specious qualities of anthropomorphics in comics we had come to expect (radioactive transformation of animals into human-like form) while offering highly adult themes. Though the series’ first issues were rife with robots and ninjas, it quickly reframed expectations of comics as a whole. Entirely creator driven through Mirage Publishing, TMNT grappled with complex issues of Asian history, urban violence, the nature of religion, and theoretical speculations on reptilian versus mammalian supremacy in the natural world. Unlike Albedo, however, the concept of ‘turtles’ and animalism was never ignored – here, it was exploited to pursue themes of ancestry, alienation, noblesse oblige and family in ways difficult to accomplish in traditional literature. Suffice it to say, anthropomorphism in comics has been manipulated in ways obvious and subtle to make us question our assumptions of how we engage with our own humanity – often, there are traits that are so endemic to the human condition that we overlook them, and being confronted with animals helps us to investigate these in provocative ways. Conversely, aspiring to greatness either physically or intellectually most frequently means transcending our limitations, or at the very least questioning the boundaries that are established for us even in the makeup of our own bodies. Animal visuals coupled with human dialog make us see these as what they really are: conventions, able to be upset through a dramatic shift in perspective. We suspend our reality to make room for anthropomorphism – this suspension allows us to recontextualize other elements of the text, lending itself to a deconstructive engagement with concepts we otherwise wouldn’t question.

#125 I'm Not Your Real Daddy: Anthropomorphism and Compassion in Simone Lia's Fluffy

Grayb — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 01:57:21 +0000

Last week, Scott (thanks for swapping with me, buddy!) did a great job of exploring how anthropomorphism in comics is really more about understanding humanity than any desire to commune with animals in a significant way. As Scott notes,

I’m more of the mind that we employ animals in comics because we inherently realize the limitations of our human forms and are constantly seeking alternate means of rationalizing our worlds through means that, while unrealistic, have some semblance of plausibility – animals allow us to think beyond ourselves in ways that have been presented as specious in most media, from Wells’ Island of Dr. Moreau to Cronenberg’s The Fly, resulting in fascinating storytelling and fantastic worlds that are not so surreal as to ostracize us from participation within them.

I love this reading of the intersection between the animal and the human and what it means to invoke anthropomorphism. But Scott's reading focuses on the superheroic as a place to examine the invocation of animals, and while this makes a lot of sense (there are so many examples to reflect upon!) I'm more interested in anthropomorphism in slice of life comics. While the purpose is a superhero comic might be quite obvious, why draw on animals-as-humans in what is supposed to be otherwise a realistic genre? For this post, I'm thinking specifically about Fluffy, an utterly exquisite offering by Simone Lia and published in North America by DarkHorse Originals. Fluffy is the story, cryptically enough, of Fluffy, a bunny who doesn't really know he's a bunny but instead thinks he is the human child of Michael Pulcino. Michael, for his part, resists Fluffy's desire to force him in to the roll of father, and regularly corrects Fluffy's assumptions, assuring him that he is, in fact, a bunny and not a child. After this panel, he tells Fluffy that Fluffy is "a bunny rabbit." Fluffy is horrified by this, throwing a temper tantrum and screaming, "You're a bad daddy for saying that!" What Fluffy's anthropomorphism expresses is a desire to belong; he loves Michael and he loves Michael's family. He seems himself as part of it. So, similar to Scott's discussion about humanity and anthropomorphism, it's through Fluffy's anthropomorphism that a yearning for humanity can be expressed. In this way, Lia explores the childhood desire for belonging that is such a common part of human experience. Michael's inability to accept Fluffy as his child aligns with his inability to face a number of issues in his life. He is being "stalked" by a woman who believes herself to be his girlfriend but with whom he cannot have an honest conversation. (The woman is Fluffy's kindergarten teacher and is perhaps too close to a happy family for Michael's comfort.) He is likewise unable to have an adult conversation with his parents about his role in their lives and vice versa. Michael tends to avoid difficult conversations and moments through the text. Indeed, while he is the central character in the narrative, he's not particularly likable because of his inability to cope with daily life and confrontation. Michael's growth, within the narrative, is most clearly marked by his acceptance of Fluffy as his child. Fluffy's denial of his inherent bunny-ness is never the focus of the narrative. Instead, the anthropomorphism is accepted as fact: Michael's ability to cope with it is the measure of his compassion and, by extension, his humanity.

#126 "How is your caudal appendage?" - Anthropomorphism in Linda Medley's 'Castle Waiting'

hattiek — Wed, 24 Jul 2013 16:29:09 +0000

Linda Medley’s ‘Castle Waiting’ is a charming collection of comics that takes familiar characters and situations from nursery rhymes and fairy tales and puts them together in an enchanting series of comics. A few years ago the entire series was collected and published in two volumes by Fantagraphics. The collected volumes are lovely books in their own right, probably some of my favourite comics I own, beautiful hardback books with gorgeous illustrated chapter dividers and a ribbon to use as a bookmark (what are those things called?). Medley’s art is wonderful, black and white drawings with characters that feel so fully realized that they really might just jump out of the pages and start talking to you. The first story introduces the character of the titular castle itself through Medley’s own retelling of the Sleeping Beauty tale. As Sleeping Beauty is awoken by Prince Charming, she decides not to stay and rule over her kingdom but rather to head off into the sunset with her beau and so the castle is left waiting. We return to it some years later, when it is now populated by a ramshackle bunch of characters, including Sleeping Beauty’s own abandoned ladies in waiting. We join the castle just as a new resident arrives on the scene, Jain who is pregnant and on the run from her tyrannical husband. Each issue tells a different characters back story, always against the backdrop of contemporary everyday life in the castle as it waits for its ruler to return. One of my favourite things about Medley is the way in which she incorporates anthropomorphism into her work. From the fiddle-playing cat who pops up at a town market, to the three little pigs who wave goodbye to Jain as she heads out of town, ‘Castle Waiting’ is full of the animals that populate our nursery rhymes and fairy tales. The town’s money-changer is a cunning cat dressed in Tudor clothes, while his secretary is a rabbit wearing a ruff. However this is not presented as anything worthy of any note, indeed very little reference is made to anyone’s physical appearance and this is particularly true in the case of two of the main characters. Rackham, the castle’s stork-headed steward and Chess a travelling Knight and ladies ‘man’ who also happens to be a horse. ‘Castle Waiting’ is funny, really very funny indeed and one of the best moments in the book comes when the narrative pushes the reader to acknowledge Rackham’s Stork-like form. After Jain’s baby is born, he is one day taken away by the castle’s resident bearded nun, who wraps him in a blanket and persuades Rackham to carry him in his beak and flap his arms despite Rackham’s protest that “it’s nothing but a folkloric contrivance, and besides it’s degrading”. A little later in the book we are introduced to Chess and the doctor enquires of him “How is your caudal appendage?” Chess replies “My tail?... Should’ve had you remove it years ago. Much more comfortable, and the ladies really like it! Daresay I’ve started a trend”. I have read and reread ‘Castle Waiting’ many times now and these panels never fail to raise a snigger from me. Just as when we read fairy tales and nursery rhymes as children we never seem to question that a cow might have jumped over the moon, nor that a cat can play the fiddle, in ‘Castle Waiting’ it seems perfectly right that Chess is one of the kingdom’s most eligible and popular gentlemen. I love that Medley has created a world so evocative and real that a dandyish stork man seems perfectly plausible; indeed he only seems absurd when he is forced to behave like a stork. Medley’s use of anthropomorphic characters serves to remind us that we only look silly when we’re pretending to be something we’re not comfortable with. In her introduction to ‘Castle Waiting: Volume One’ Jane Yolan calls it “a feminist fairy tale with attitude, heart, imagination, laughter, love and truth”, which is just about the perfect description of these books. I’ve spoken on here before about how I love adaptations that add something to the original source material and do things a little differently. Medley does all that and more and even manages to ensure that her adult readers of these stories learn a little something as they are pushed to reflect on how they present themselves to others and how they look at and treat those they encounter.

#127 - A Scottish Scrooge: Anthropomorphic Meaness in Walt Disney's Scrooge McDuck

damon — Tue, 30 Jul 2013 22:42:16 +0000

One of the many great things about taking part in an academic conference and presenting a paper is the feedback and comments one receives from one’s peers. Last month I presented a paper at the International Graphic Novel & International Bande Dessinée Society Conference in Glasgow (my second favourite conference that month). My paper, The Parsimonius Cartoonist: Scottish Identity and the Autobiographical Comics of Eddie Campbell looked at Campbell’s relationship with money through the prism of that most notorious of Scottish stereotypes, excessive frugality or tightfistedness. During a discussion afterwards another comics scholar wondered why I hadn’t discussed the Disney character Scrooge McDuck. Well, for the simple reason that I had never read any of the comics, “what not even Carl Barks?” they asked incredulously. No, not even, and I had only a vague recollection of the animated cartoons from my childhood. Helpfully Graphixia’s anthropomorphic season has allowed me to address this apparent oversight. By happenstance the second release in the Fantagraphics Complete Carl Barks Disney Library has only recently been published and it is all about the aforementioned Mr McDuck - Walt Disney's Uncle Scrooge: Only a Poor Old Man. Scrooge McDuck, created by Carl Barks in 1947, is the uncle of Donald Duck on his mother’s side. Although named after Charles Dickens’ famous miser Ebeneezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol, Uncle Scrooge was made to sound even stingier by being Scottish! Many sources (ie the internet) claim that McDuck was based on industrialist Andrew Carnegie, although I couldn’t find any evidence to back this up and it was never confirmed by Barks. The first story in the volume is Only A Poor Old Man, which was first published in March 1952, and straight away we are presented with one of Scrooge’s signature moves, swimming like a porpoise in his vast Money Bin. Scrooge is the richest person in the Disney universe and his fortune is described in many ways. At the start of this story it is ‘umpteen-centrifugilillion dollars’ but throughout the book it is most commonly described as filling an area of ‘three cubic acres’. Scrooge’s Scottish heritage is detailed in The Horse-Radish Treasure from September 1953. In a flashback set in 1753 we see Scrooge’s ancestor Captain Seafoam McDuck swindled in a deal to carry a chest of horse-radish from Glasgow to Jamaica on his ship the Golden Goose. In real life many shipping merchants made their fortunes sailing between Glasgow and America in the 18^th century. The Merchant City area of Glasgow still betrays the fortunes of these nouveau riche traders with its grand architecture. The neo-classical palace that today houses the Gallery of Modern Art was originally the home of ‘Tobacco Laird’ William Cunninghame. The gallery’s vast ground floor was once his ballroom. The tobacco trade was part of the trading route trading between Britain and North America and the Caribbean, it later became a leg of the ‘triangular trade’ when it connected with the slave trade from West Africa. In Painting the Forth Bridge: A Search for Scottish Identity, Carl MacDougall claims that Glasgow’s love affair with America dates back to these Tobacco Lords in the 1700s. A modern version of this trans-Atlantic connection can be seen in the many artists in Hope Street studios in Glasgow who are producing superhero comics for Marvel and DC. Reading these comics for the first time I can appreciate the joy people find in them. Scrooge is a self-made umpteen-centrifugilillionairre who is always figuring out ways not to spend his money. The one-page gag strips are some of my favourites as they cut straight to the heart of his character. On finding out that a taxi starts the meter as soon as he enters the cab, Scrooge pauses at the door, only climbing inside when the stop light changes to green. In another short strip a beggar keeps asking for a dime for coffee and eventually Scrooge relents but only because he can buy one for himself and the second cup is free. This shows that he is not completely heartless and in the longer strip Back to the Klondike we are introduced to Glittering Goldie, a woman from Scrooge’s prospecting past and possible previous love interest. They feud again and Scrooge decides to stage a competition with her to see who can find his buried treasure of gold nuggets. When Goldie wins Scrooge blames his failure on forgetting to take his memory medication, however Donald realises that he didn’t forget but allowed Goldie to win. Although he would never admit to it, Scrooge wanted to see this woman from his past escape her life of destitution. Like other Disney staff Barks worked anonymously until his identity was uncovered in the late 1950s, until then fans knew him only as the Good Duck Artist and it’s easy to see why. His anthropomorphic creatures are full of life and character, be they ducks, dogs or pigs. I think my favourites are Scrooge’s nemeses the Beagle Boys who are all completely identical and are only differentiated by the prison numbers on their chests (see them on the book cover above). Some of the more fantastical creatures are the denizens of the undersea world in The Secret of Atlantis. The scaly green gilled human-fish are reminiscent of The Creature from the Black Lagoon, which came out in cinemas the same year (1954). I’d also wager that Mike Mignola had read that strip before coming up with the character Abe Sapien in Hellboy.

The backgrounds are often wonderfully detailed, Atlantis, and the whales that swim around it, are much more ‘realistically’ rendered than Scrooge and Donald. Similarly the Shangri-la-esque village of Tralla La in the strip of the same name is in a very detailed Himalayan mountain valley. However, the yellow slant eyed ducks that live in Tralla La are a little troublesome but perhaps just a product of the unenlightened politics of the time. Strangely in this world of anthropomorphic ducks, dogs and pigs, the creature that Scrooge ask for directions to the village appears to be human.

For Graphixia’s Anthropomorphic season I had initially intended to write about Norwegian cartoonist Jason and while I enjoyed my brief foray into the world of Disney as drawn by Carl Barks, it is the new Jason volume Lost Cat that I will be looking forward to as my next anthropomorphic purchase! Works cited Barks, Carl Uncle Scrooge: Only a Poor Man. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2012. Campbell, Eddie The Lovely Horrible Stuff. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions, 2012. Jason Lost Cat Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2013. MacDougall, Carl Painting the Forth Bridge: A Search for Scottish Identity. London: Aurum Press, 2001.

#128 - Jeffrey Brown grows up: Maturity, Adulthood and A Matter Of Life

pjohnston — Tue, 06 Aug 2013 05:31:59 +0000

Jeffrey Brown’s latest graphic novel, A Matter Of Life, is a first for him. After working in simple, straight-to-pen black and white for many years, Brown has recently begun working in colour, with the Transformers-esque Incredible Change-Bots and his two popular reimaginings of Darth Vader as a father to little Luke and Leia, Darth Vader and Son and Vader’s Little Princess. A Matter Of Life, however, is his first autobiographical work in colour, and it is Brown’s autobiographical work that made his name in comics, so it’s a welcome addition to his oeuvre. A Matter Of Life explores Brown’s relationship with his young son, Oscar, as well as his relationship with his own father. This relationship leads Brown to explore the significance of religion in his life, as his father was a minister at their local church. Previous books such as Little Things and Funny Misshapen Body hinted at tensions with his father and religious childhood but always skirted around them, most likely for fear of misrepresenting his family. The focus of Brown’s autobiographical work was also on his romantic relationships previously, candidly depicting the graphic sexual and emotional failures therein. His 2010 “B-sides” collection, Undeleted Scenes, did feature two shorter stories about his son’s birth and subsequent hospital visits, but they were in black and white and did not explore the emotional depth of the father-son bond. But they felt like a progression: a growing maturity and graceful ageing of Brown’s comics. With A Matter Of Life this progression has reached a peak just as Brown is at the peak of his career, with a recent Eisner award win under his belt. He has also earned the significant literary accolade of being a New York Times Bestselling author, even if it is for his Star Wars-related books and not his autobiographical ones. The book is episodic, bound together with a thematic rather than a distinct linear narrative thread, but does not suffer for it. Brown alternates between vignettes from his own childhood and Oscar’s, with the young Jeffrey being involved in the church, believing in God and dealing with guilt and the questioning his belief. Oscar, meanwhile, is not brought up with religion being something he must follow without question – instead, we see him asking his dad some difficult questions and discovering adult things, such as his own mortality, which doesn’t seem to concern him too much, as he tells his dad excitedly that he can “FIGHT dying!” There is a significant contrast between young Jeff and young Oscar: Jeff grows up with shame, worry and confusion, while Oscar always appears innocent, bright and optimistic: an almost perfect child. The implication is that Jeff is a better parent for bringing up his own son without the worries that were forced upon him and being more open with Oscar about religion being his own decision; however, this is never made explicit and is complicated and refuted significantly by many of the stories which depict Jeff and his own dad together. We see them enjoying pizza, taking a trip to New York together, and playing trains with Oscar, free entirely from any of the resentment which Jeff could easily have harboured due to the religious upbringing he rejected as an adult. The book could have been a bitter and bleak graphic novel, but is instead full of warmth and humour, aided by the bright colour scheme. It is framed at the beginning and end by splash pages which appear to have been painted rather than drawn, and which depict stars and space in a much more abstract, expressionistic style than Brown’s drawings. This framing reminds us that the short stories in A Matter Of Life are just small moments in the context both of Brown’s entire life and the vastness of the universe, but that therein lies life itself – also an underlying theme in Brown’s Little Things. His choice moments of family life paint a picture of complex, but powerful love, and of a strong, sweet bond between two generations of fathers and sons. The striking refinement and emotional intelligence of A Matter Of Life, and Brown’s gradual development and new found maturity in this book, is an apt metaphor for the development of comics as an art form. The form has been sullied by accusations of a lack of narrative ambition and childish, underdeveloped storytelling (part of the arguments of Frederic Wertham and others which led to the founding of the Comics Code Authority), and these accusations could well be made of Brown’s work. Although the raw, underdeveloped art style and painful honesty first engaged me with Jeffrey Brown’s work, I still have trouble refuting these accusations when they’re levelled at Brown’s early graphic novels. Brown himself is aware of these criticisms, of course, and has made of light of them throughout his career. The first page of his collection of one-shots and strip cartoons, I Am Going To Be Small, is a collection of dubious but true “praise,” rewritten in Brown’s round, childish letters. According to writer Warren Ellis, Brown’s works (which, at this point in his career, can refer only to his relationship comics Clumsy and Unlikely) are “emotionally about six years old,” while the Portland Mercury calls them “Pathetic losers’ nerd-porn as illustrated by a five-year-old.” And cutting though they are, these words are easily backed up by a selection of almost any panels from Brown’s first two books, which variously depict him crying on the phone to his girlfriend, comforting his crying girlfriend as she expresses the belief that she ruined his loss of virginity for him and having awkward, uncomfortable sex. The same criticisms, however, could not be made of A Matter Of Life. The art, whilst still simple, with varied lines and a cuteness similar to that of his Top Shelf contemporaries James Kochalka, Craig Thompson and Paul Hornschemeir, is refined, engaging and expertly rendered, with straightforward colours and shading that sit well within Brown’s lines. His Raymond Carver-esque microcosmic stories are literate, engaging narratives which subtly expose emotion, depth and complexity. With this book, Jeffrey Brown has truly come of age, whilst still retaining the simplicity, humour and warmth of his earlier work. Works Cited: Brown, Jeffrey A Matter Of Life. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions, 2013. ... Clumsy. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions, 2002. ... Darth Vader and Son. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2012. ... Funny Misshapen Body. New York: Touchstone, 2009. ... I Am Going To Be Small. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions, 2006. ... Incredible Change-Bots. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions, 2007. ... Little Things. New York: Touchstone, 2008. ... Undeleted Scenes. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions, 2010. ... Unlikely. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions, 2003. ... Vader’s Little Princess. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2013.

#129: A Day in the Life on the Farm with Jason Turner: Or Why I Am So Dumb

wilkinsp — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 02:59:27 +0000

I wanted to order a copy of Simon Moreton’s Grand Gestures for someone who had helped us out tremendously with our Graphixia Comics and the Multimodal World conference and was keen on Simon’s work. Grand Gestures is published by Retrofit, Box Brown’s publishing outfit in Philadelphia. Because sending all that way for a single comic book seemed foolish, I also ordered Andrew White’s We Will Remain (his work has impressed me on the Comics Workbook Tumblr), and I took a flyer on Jason Turner’s Farm School because it looked interesting. When I learned that Turner is a Vancouver comics artist, the thought of sending to Philadelphia to aquire the work of a local artist struck me as funny. As I started digging and discovered that True Loves the comic that Turner works on with his wife Manien Bothma was nominated for the “One Book, One Vancouver” prize in 2007 and is recognized as a comic that is quintessentially associated with Vancouver, I felt that if I knew anything about comics I would already know Turner’s work. I had sent away to Philadelphia to find out something about home and about my own ignorance. Farm School is a great example of “show, don’t tell” narrative comics art. I suppose “post-apocalyptic” is the word everyone writing about this book will use to describe it. The standard description of the book is a “pastoral post-apocalyptic walking story” (which reminded me of Oliver East’s work). But we know know little about the apocalypse that has caused the urban environment, and the human society within it, to devolve into a ‘pastoral’ state. The traces of the modern world remain tantalizingly, in the bombed out buildings and abandonned automobiles that the grass and trees encroach on. The plot of the comic is essentially the returning of a book to the library. The main character, Hester, emerges from the woods in contemporary military dress with a deer that she has shot with a bow and arrow across her back. Her mission is to go to the centre of the city, to the Crystal Palace, that operates as an information hub, to get news of a relative. The Crystal Palace is the only place that has computers, that can retrieve e-mail; it is a post-apocalyptic telegraph office. Along the way, Hester drops off the deer with her friend Mabel, who says she wishes Hester would return to the town permanently from the woods and asks her to return a library book. When Hester visits the bakery along her way, the baker also makes a request, asking her to escort his daughter, Patricia, to town so she can deliver baguettes. Presumably such a task involves some danger. This notion of a journey in which the character picks up things and people along the way makes a sly nod to the video-game tradition as well as the picaresque/romance/epic tradition. But because Farm School is presented as a slice of life, everything is low key. The epic battles are in the past, though danger always lurks in the margins and ominous backgrounds. Farm School’s success as a comic depends on the interplay between foreground and background in both images and narrative. The backgrounds in the panels serve as evidence of a violent battle, as does Hester’s military outfit. Meanwhile, in the foreground we see a buccolic, perhaps even nostalgic, story of people carrying out simple functions of human exchange. The farm school of the title is a place where people learn to grow vegetables that they trade for things like bread. Turner’s philosophical focus in the comic is the overlay of exchange networks: the way that the revived ‘old-fashioned’ network of exchanging goods relates to our contemporary technological network of exchanging information. The notion of traffic and intersection appears in the totemization of a set of traffic lights slung over a tree. Hester makes sure to leave tributes: Red for blood, gold for the sun and green for plants. This moment both crystallizes Turner’s post- and pre-modern interplay and suggests the arbitrariness of iconic signs. The action climax of the narrative occurs when Hester fails to stop Patricia from escaping town for the dangerous outlying area with a bunch of her friends. She cannot overcome Patricia’s youthful free will. But the real substance of the story lies in Hester’s refusal to live in the town–she resides instead in the nearby woods–or sleep in a building. Obviously, Hester has some sort of post-traumatic stress syndrome as a result of some battle, perhaps a battle that led to the world looking the way that it does. Hester’s anxiety about the world that surrounds her as she moves through her mundane activities of the day has the feel of an autobiographical comic. So it’s not surprising to learn that Jason Turner is well into autobiographical comics, my favourite being Year 40 that documents living in Vancouver through the 2010 Winter Olympics. My response to Farm School was pretty much the diametrical opposite to Derik Badman’s. That is, he dislikes it and I like it for the same reasons. Here is what Badman says:

Mostly I was just bored. I’m not really sure what the point of the comic was. It wasn’t all about the world building (the way Finder is at times), at least not enough to be interesting on its own. It wasn’t really about the characters. It didn’t have much of a plot. It wasn’t poetic or just aesthetically beautiful. It was more like a part of something bigger that got hacked down to short comic size. A lot of narrative comics seem to have that trouble, like people don’t want to spend the time/effort to really do the narrative, or they can’t quite edit out in a way to make it work, but they still want to tell a story.

What Badman sees as “hacked down,” I see as synecdochic, as Farm School applies the narrative strategies of the slice of life comic to the sci-fi apocalyptic comic, to create a neat hybrid. The point here is not that Turner is “lazy” but that he is putting the viewer to work, engaging him or her in the act of imagining what the artist leaves out. It’s pretty clear early on that Turner is presenting a synecdoche of something, and even if we cannot derive the whole clearly from this part, I for one was pretty interested in trying. I guess the point of contention between Badman and I on this comic is who should be doing what kind of work in the producer/consumer network. Badman wants Turner to do more of the work that I feel the viewer should be doing. I don’t necessarily think that either of us is “correct”; we just have different aesthetic responses. Finally, I have to say that the quality of Retrofit’s books is excellent, well-worth the five or six dollars you will spend on each. The print quality is beautiful and the books are on lovely paper. My only qualm is the absence of page numbers. Works Cited Turner, Jason. Farm School. Philadelphia: Retrofit, 2013

#130 Comics, The Internet, and The Impossible Archive

admin — Wed, 21 Aug 2013 04:50:35 +0000

This post evolved from a central question: what can comics teach us about understanding the internet? At this point, the internet, as we call that amorphous blob of literary, visual, and audible content, has become untraceable. While the origins can perhaps be tracked back to UCLA, Menlo Park and a few digital bulletin boards, the narrative of its evolution has dissipated under a morass of webpages catering to every possible niche, half-finished or unstarted blogs, social sites, shifting design iterations, and the decline and fall of once mighty aggregators such as AOL, MySpace, Delicious, and soon, irrevocably, Pinterest (a comicbook if there ever was one), Twitter and Facebook. Indeed, the history of the internet seems to find its genesis in ARPANET, reductively a connection between two computers in two different places; between Leonard Kleinrock and Douglas Engelbart. Themselves of immigrant, and mixed racial heritage, their position at the forefront of the “invention” of the internet rhymes with the mythologies around Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who of course gave us Superman. In fact, the genesis mythology surrounding two guys collaborating and making connections others have missed is an important part of the current understanding of the internet and those who work within digital culture. Two guys in a garage started Apple and a fourteen year-old kid started Microsoft. The story of the internet, like that of comics, is often infused with DIY ethics and collaborations between excluded geniuses with unique, but unrecognized, talents. The internet’s untraceable and evolving birth has links with both the evolving and constantly shifting origin myths of comics and the very nature of the medium of comics with its multiple storylines, character versions, and alternative sequences. Even the porn industry’s recognition of the possibilities for the internet is mimicked in the Tijuana Bibles of early comics – though perhaps not quite so publicly. Suffice to say, as it is impossible to run a straight line through the multiple iterations of Superman or Batman or Spiderman or The X-Men, it is impossible to say just how the internet has evolved into what it is now. All this leads to how the coincidences between comics and the internet suggest bigger things about origins and histories. Comics, like the internet, seem to be in possession of an impossible archive. That is, there is simply too much material, too many narratives, too many representations, to allow for the careful accumulation and recording of what has been and gone. Comics often thrive on the scarcity of their beginnings (bought issue #1 of Action Comics lately?). At least comics save their iterations. The internet simply overwrites them and leaves no trace, except perhaps in an obscure line of code. That said, comics can teach us a lot about how to think about the internet and in particular, its content. The structure of the internet is at once a community and a private space. It involves, as comics so often do, a place where many people gather, but also a space where we encounter things on our own, obscured from the view of others - a flashlight under the covers. We are connected in the sense that we are looking at similar things, most of the time, but we are disconnected in the sense that we tend to experience them on our own, away from the crowd. While we might venture down to the comic shop on Wednesdays to see what’s up with others coming in for the weekly releases, we don’t read comics together - we read them alone. The content of the internet, organized as it is in a series of boxes (or .divs for the coders in the crowd) reflects the organization of the comic with its connected images and directed text – even the hyperlink suggests the ever present “*check Hulk #13 for back story, ed.” in the narration box of comics that links us back to other stories. Comics are also one giant linked story; some would argue that all Superheroes follow the tropes established in Superman, no matter the obvious deviations. In short, everything in comics suggests a link to something else – story, artist, place, golden age, silver age, yellow press, mass consumption, character, censorship, youth, buying power, coming of age, war, racism, violence, sex, on and on it goes. Comics, if we could throw every issue ever in one room, reflect the linkages that make the internet what it is; the internet doesn’t just look like comics do, it’s organized around the same iterative principles that seem to govern the internet – we cannot hope to collect it all. This is but a small snapshot of some of the coincidences between comics and the internet. The ease with which comics seem to have transitioned onto digital media suggests these coincidences may have other properties to do with similar audiences, similar structures, similar creative practices. One thing is for sure, the internet and our interpretation of it has a lot to learn from comics and comicbook collectors who manage an immense body of production (Scott had to consult a structural engineer). The internet might also be the endgame that shows precisely and definitively how comics have become entrenched in models for cultural production in the Twenty First Century.

#131 Collected Disorganized Thoughts on Girls and Cats: Or, Brenna Finds More Reasons to Write about Bryan Lee O'Malley

Grayb — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 05:49:41 +0000

I know I've given a lot of column inches (pixel widths?) to Bryan Lee O'Malley's staggeringly popular and totally wonderful Scott Pilgrim series. I posted about it here, and here, and then also here, and then Peter and I travelled to Leeds to talk about it some more (and then I gave another talk [at least partly] about it in Wales). 2012 was sort of the Year of Scott Pilgrim for me. You'd think I'd be out of stuff to say about O'Malley's oeuvre! But I've been prepping for my new semester and have been spending a lot of time with his first comic, Lost at Sea, which I am teaching this year in my first-year literature course. I typically theme this course around coming-of-age and gender and trauma, and Lost at Sea fits this thematic niche perfectly. A slice of life narrative without a superheroic overlay, this first comic is far darker and more bleak than the Scott Pilgrim series. Where Scott's battles are clear and his path to victory obvious, Raleigh of Lost at Sea is battling internal demons, and her chance of success is not at all inevitable. O'Malley's ability to deal with emotion in a nuanced and complicated way surprised me when I first read this particular comic, especially since an obvious criticism of Scott Pilgrim is the inherent lack of emotional nuance. In Lost at Sea, Raleigh is depressed -- deeply depressed, really -- and O'Malley employs effective use of empty space, black space, and a kind of shaky hand-lettered quality to evoke this for the reader. Raleigh's emotional world is difficult to navigate (she's a teenage girl, after all, and O'Malley resists the infuriating adult urge to make adolescence make sense when viewed in retrospect) but deeply and thoughtfully constructed. But it's a text-heavy narrative, especially considering that O'Malley is a cartoonist first (as opposed to authors who fall backwards into comics and whose reliance on text is perhaps more predictable); at first glance, text dominates many panels and indeed whole pages. But what O'Malley does here that is interesting is use images and text to tell parallel and complementary, but not identical, stories. In the panel to the right, for example, Raleigh's thoughts are (as they often are) entirely internalized; she is focused not on the events of the moment, but on her ability to experience them effectively. At the same time, O'Malley illustrates what Raleigh seems to be missing in the real world around her. The images in the comic serve to underscore Raleigh's biggest liability -- that she lives wholly inside her head. Instead of the heavy use of text indicating an early-career reliance on traditional narrative storytelling, O'Malley is engaged in a tremendously sophisticated comic strategy by assigning different tasks to the text and the imagery. (As an aside, I'm interested to see what students do with this, as it requires a lot of cognitive work to knit the two together in a way that makes sense). O'Malley also weaves a long-running metaphor through Lost at Sea involving cats. Raleigh is allergic to cats. Raleigh was once attacked by a cat in a life she barely remembers before her parents' divorce. Raleigh sees cats and hears meowing everywhere. Raleigh finds cats inexplicable attracted to her. Raleigh believes a cat has her soul. Cats, cats, cats, indeed. They represent an easy way to categorize Raleigh's disconnection from people around her -- her soullessness renders her non-human, and thus excuses her inability to interact, and allows her to triangulate her ability to connect through, for example, the stray cats her friends collect for her in an attempt to locate her soul. And Raleigh's dislike of cats and her allergy to them keeps her clearly distanced from her own emotional world, even as she lives entirely in her head, because she cannot make contact with this essential part of herself. The cat metaphor is not always successful; there are times when it seems to be overdone and many times, like when Raleigh encounters a gift shop full of stuffed cats, where any meaningful connection to its larger metaphorical meaning seems difficult to unravel. And unfortunately, it seems to drop from the text without resolution in favour of stars and open skies as a way to conceive of the future. But when O'Malley makes use of cats and their manifestation as representatives of Raleigh's mental state, it's effective and thoughtful. Fans of Scott Pilgrim are eagerly anticipating Seconds, O'Malley's follow-up comic to be published next year. I'm hoping that we'll see a combination of the breadth and scope of Scott Pilgrim with the depth and emotional complexity of Lost at Sea.

#132 David Wong’s Escape to Gold Mountain: A Graphic Novel in the History Classroom?

smarsden — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 02:52:04 +0000

As a librarian in a predominantly international college, I’m often tasked with the doubly challenging problem of trying to get our student body, mostly in their late teens / early twenties, to read co-curricular texts both for recreational purposes and for research to ultimately wind up in their essays. When asking them what they’re interested in for my semesterly book order, I’m typically met with blank stares – firstly, recreational reading in a language they’re just coming to terms with is challenging enough. Moreover, they’re twenty, so the idea of reading anything of length in any language is generally anathema to where they’re at in their lives.

Enter the graphic novel. I’ve recently built up our collection to include classics such as Sandman, Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns and the like (and yes, Brenna, I just bought and catalogued all six Scott Pilgrim books). Moreover, based on student recommendations I’ve purchased several manga texts, from Doraemon to Fullmetal Alchemist to Naruto, all of which have been flying off the shelves. As we’ve gone over at length on Graphixia (and as what could be considered the founding principle argument of the site), there’s something compelling about words juxtaposed with images that acts as a gateway for reading and literary analysis, making graphic narratives a useful inclusion in any academic space. I was still stuck, however, when it came to secondary research material for classroom projects and essays, until I was recommended an excellent (and locally produced by Vancouver's own Arsenal Pulp) text by one of our History instructors, serendipitously on a topic that jibes quite well with our particular group of students.

Escape to Gold Mountain, written and drawn by David H.T. Wong, is a pseudo-historical account of several generations of a Chinese family who made their way to Canada during the nineteenth century and the trials that they faced while establishing a place in their new world – “Gold Mountain,” in Chinese Gam Saan, was their name for North America. A little like Forrest Gump, the text oscillates between relating real historical people (e.g. Sun Yat Sen, Emily Carr) and events contextualized through the emotional responses of fictional characters who lived through them, in this case literally putting faces on the travesties of exclusion, abuse, exploitation and sometimes wholesale slaughter of early Asian migrants to Canada and the United States. Throughout the narrative, we are presented with the construction of the railway, facsimiles of posters meant to engender hatred towards the Chinese, quotations from interviews and historical documents such as America’s 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act (and Canada’s own 1923 Chinese Immigration Act) and genuine, cited accounts of the atrocities committed over the past two centuries. Covering information ranging from the establishment of the Head Tax (along with its particulars) all the way through to Canada’s very recent mea culpa for the blatant racism in the nation’s collective past, the text makes for a highly useful and practical summative reading of the adversity that Chinese Canadians have faced over the years – a very useful inclusion in any history class.

But such textbooks already exist, albeit in regular, words without pictures format. Why choose to offer this information as a graphic novel? What is compelling about Wong’s work is not only the emotional family story that is interwoven throughout its historical accounts, but the fact that through the detailed architecture of the cityscapes, the anguish on his character’s faces, the sheer scope of the projects undertaken by migrant workers presented visually we are far more bound to the history than simple text can allow for. It is hardly an easy text, packed with detailed information throughout, but like a good historical film the visual nature of its expression situates the past within the present and makes the characters and events accessible from both an academic as well as a personal perspective. When the destruction of Nanking in 1937 is discussed, it is framed through one of the novel’s several protagonists, Gee-Mun, who is denied the right to bring his family into Canada because of the Immigration Act. Seeing the horror in his expression, the blackened panels as he prays for their safety (and ultimately learns of their deaths), Wong takes every advantage of the medium to allow us to experience the real, ontological history of the event as expressed through the sympathy we bear for these characters. Escape to Gold Mountain is rife with these moments of history juxtaposed with personal suffering, and manifested visually, it literally draws us in to the cultural moment. As Imogene Lim notes, “this format allows the reader to visualize individuals as … your relatives, your neighbors … there are no caricatures of the slant-eyed, buck toothed, or conical hatted individuals that have been frequently used to stereotype Asians; in Wong’s drawings we see real people” (14).

The history of race relations in Canada, as it is everywhere, is already graphic in nature – it is violent, fraught with suffering and tragedy, and is typically glossed by way of apologias and modern revisions to government policies that seem to speciously negate any explorations of the troubling nature of the West’s collective past. Presenting such a controversial subject in this medium does double service to its topic in that provides an entrypoint for those new to the history (or even to those new to reading in English), while it also recontextualizes the static, sedate details of historical documents for those overly familiar with the subject already. In any other medium, Escape to Gold Mountain would be categorized as historical fiction. In comics, we don’t see many of these types of texts that straddle the academic and the personal (though Lutes’ Berlin is an excellent example of the form), so it allows for a humanizing of the subject without a typical categorization of “fiction” that would mark it as unfit for scholarly research (a nerdy librarian sidenote: its Library of Congress call number begins with FC instead of PN, placing it on the Canadian History shelf instead of beside Graphic Novels). The text is a hybrid, containing fictional characters while being well referenced and endnoted for those wishing to either validate its claims or pursue further study, and more than any other text I’ve encountered shows what the graphic novel is capable of in terms of reaching outside of the English department to complement research in other disciplines. Escape to Gold Mountain has certainly found a welcome home on my library’s shelves, and I can only hope that more graphic novels demonstrating a similar willingness to defy expectations of traditional History textbooks will follow in its wake.

Work Cited

Wong, David H.T. Escape to Gold Mountain: A Graphic History of the Chinese in North America. Vancouver: Aresenal Pulp Press, 2012.

#133 - Alienated by the Strip: Daniel Clowes’s Comic-Strip Novel Ice Haven

benoit — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 05:38:55 +0000

In only 89 pages, Daniel Clowes’ Ice Haven (2005) hosts a remarkable cast of characters with about 14 central protagonists, each in turn given close attention. What binds them all together is the backdrop against which their lives are set, the fictional small town called Ice Haven, and the dramatic event that set it in turmoil: the kidnapping of David Goldberg. Albeit functioning as the backbone of the book, this criminal case is quickly overtaken by the thoughts and everyday lives of the manifold characters. Each character is given his own comic strip, a structure Clowes borrows from the Sunday comics pages: “I started reading old Sunday newspapers to get inspiration, and I realized what a great thing it would be if the characters from each comic strip kind of had something to do with each other, even though they are done in completely different styles” (Clowes qtd. in Guilbert 2009). Clowes uses comic strips as building blocks for the larger narrative structure of his graphic novel. The cover of the 2005 book format advertises Ice Haven as a ‘comic-strip novel’. This paratextual self-definition is something of an oxymoron. With their short form, comic strips build towards a comic climax--usually a gag or slapstick--and do not generally share the kind of development and narrative complexity that is expected from graphic novels, which rather put a particular emphasis on the storytelling. Moreover, comic strips have been and still are “an editorially conservative medium, bound by inflexible formatting constraints” (Hatfield 2005: 4). According to Hatfield, the formal constraints of the comic strip have impeded it from realizing the kind of groundbreaking innovations witnessed in book-length alternative comics (2005: 3). Quite paradoxically, Clowes is trying to use the very formal constraints of the comic strip to address thematic concerns typical of alt comics. In this regard, Peter Sattler recently remarked that “[Clowes’s] work goes out of its way to thematize the artist’s and/or the story’s struggle against comics themselves – against a form that, as Clowes presents it, seems unable to encompass interior states, unable to escape its own theatricality and artificiality, unable to circumvent its own closed system of beginnings and endings, set-ups and punch-lines” (Sattler qtd. in Berlatsky 2013). Sattler further touches on Wilson (2010) and the rigid structure of the one-page gag that stands in the way of its thematic ambition. In Ice Haven, however, Clowes’ struggle against the limits of the comic strip serves the thematic concerns of the larger narrative: instead of being an obstacle to the representation of interior states, they contribute in depicting loneliness. The format indeed participates in harboring a feeling of alienation and disconnection so typical of Clowes’s oeuvre. As Xavier Guilbert notices, “the isolation of the self-centered characters is reinforced by the comic-strip structure of the story, confining each individual to his or her own understanding of the world, prisoner of his or her own space even in the seldom moments when their paths cross” (Guilbert 2006; my translation). Clowes draws on a variety of styles and genres to underpin the individuality of each comic strip, turning the characters into the (anti)heroes of their own story. An interesting example is Clowes’ take on romance comics in the segments casting an egocentric teenager named Violet Vanderplatz. Here Clowes struggles against the melodramatic tone that undercuts his representation of Violet’s psychological torments. This unavoidable sense of "theatricality and artificiality" seems nonetheless to be issued from Violet herself, who stages her own life as a romance comic and consequently confronts the clichés of the genre. While the comic-strip structure traps the characters into their own interior world, the larger narrative unity of the ‘novel’ binds them together around the communal experience of the disappearance of David Goldberg and the collective relief of his release. All the characters basically share the same reality, appear on the same stage, but the reader’s access to that reality is unavoidably mediated by a specific viewpoint. From the interplay of the various comic strips arises a polyphonic narrative, a juxtaposition of different subjective instances. What the juxtaposition of the various viewpoints in Ice Haven reveals is that one cannot escape from his or her own subjective position and understanding of the world. The rare attempts at communication are constantly thwarted by misinterpretation. The would-be writer Vida, for instance, is a great admirer of the unknown and frustrated poet Random Wilder, and tries to catch his attention by giving him a zine she has written. Wilder is overwhelmed by its quality and consequently loses every bit of his own artistic ambitions. He is so disheartened that he “can’t bear to have it in the house” and tosses it in the garbage, through which Vida later rummages. The discovery of her own zine leads her to think that he found it completely worthless, and as a result she drops her own literary dreams. The interplay of both viewpoints highlights the missed connexion between two otherwise like-minded persons. While the reader benefits from an "objective" overall perspective because he is able to juxtapose different viewpoints, the characters remain enclosed in their comic strips. In Ice Haven, the constraints of the comic strip are used to underpin the theme of alienation and disconnection; the comic strip does not resist the representation of interior states, on the contrary, it defines it. Yet, Sattler is right: here again, the story is struggling against comics themselves, as the characters cannot escape the boundaries of their inner world, delineated by the rigid format of the comic strip. Works Cited Berlatsky, Noah. “Peter Sattler on Clowes Agonistes.” The Hooded Utilitarian 7 July 2013. Accessed Aug. 26 2013. Clowes, Daniel. Ice Haven. London: Jonathan Cape, 2005. Clowes, Daniel. Wilson. London: Jonathan Cape, 2010. Guilbert, Xavier. Interview with Daniel Clowes. “Daniel Clowes.” du9 March 2009. Accessed 26 Aug. 2013. Guilbert, Xavier. “Ice Haven de Daniel Clowes.” du9 Jan. 2006. Accessed 26 Aug. 2013. Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics. An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. * Benoît Crucifix is an MA student in Modern Languages and Literatures at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), working on a dissertation about Chris Ware's Building Stories.

#134 - "Its time for us to get out of this town" - Musings on 'The Islanders' by Amy Mason

hattiek — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 22:19:25 +0000

I felt pretty lucky this year having a job that allowed me to live in Edinburgh for the summer. For the month of August this city becomes 100 square miles of awesome. My particular favourite part this summer was the Book Festival which takes place in Charlotte Square in a collection of tents of all shapes and sizes and comes replete with a bar, a Spiegeltent, deckchairs and two bookshops. It is basically my idea of paradise.

This year’s Book Festival included a special Comics themed strand ‘Stripped’ which brought comics creators such as Neil Gaiman, Joe Sacco, Chris Ware, Posy Simmonds and Hannah Berry to talk about their works. There were also several cabaret style events held in the Spiegeltent. One such event was the reappearance of Literary Death Match in Edinburgh. In case you’re not familiar with the concept, Literary Death Match is basically like a gameshow but with extra added books, this one had a Graphic Novel theme (I know, I know, it really is the best thing ever). Authors are invited to read extracts from their work, and they are then judged on ‘Literary Merit’, ‘Performance’ and ‘Intangibles’ by a panel of judges that on this occasion consisted of Neil Gaiman, Dawn O’Porter and Craig Silvey. A winner advances from each round to take part in the final, which on this momentous night was a game of Graphic Novel Pictionary. Honestly, if Literary Death Match comes to a town even vaguely near you, make the effort to go and see it.

But on with the post… It is the winner of this little slice of tremendousness that I would like to talk about this week. This convoluted opening was merely a long and hyperactive way of telling you that I had (unfortunately) not heard of Amy Mason before this night, and now she is one of my new favourite things. Amy Mason’s The Islanders is the graphic novel that accompanies the so-called lo-fi musical she, and her ex Eddie Argos, wrote about their teenage romance and holiday to the Isle of Wight. Amy performs the text while Eddie and Jim Moray perform the music. The book contains the script, song lyrics and illustrations by Steven Horry. It also contains a link to download the songs so you can listen along as you read.

The Islanders is a relatively simple story, two teenagers fall in love, one runs away to live with the other and they struggle along, not old enough to know how to look after themselves, too much in love to always care. Indeed this is one of the book’s great strengths, its evocation of young love. I love the knowing but affectionate way in which Amy describes their relationship. She manages to poke fun at their intensity without in any way diminishing its importance. Amy’s description of the mix tapes they make one another is one of my favourite passages from the book;

“We made each other mix-tape after mix-tape. ANGELICA, KENICKIE b-sides, CICCONE, BIS… happy, upbeat, lo-fi songs that we could have written – about nonsense or young people falling in LOVE.

The tapes had names. ‘AMY’S POP HITS’ or ‘EDDIE’S SPARKLE MIX’ but what we really meant was ‘Amy, LISTEN to these SONGS and realize I LOVE YOU’ and ‘Eddie, let the SONGS on this tape CONVINCE you that I AM AMAZING and agree to NEVER LEAVE ME”.

Meanwhile her description of what made her fall in love with Eddie made me howl with laughter; “Eddie tells me he’s been on a journey to a magical land, a place where Pez grows on trees. He’s taken a supply of apples and gin to keep him going and received assistance from a friendly goat to fight a MALICIOUS GOBLIN. So THIS is WHAT he’s LIKE. The letter tells me ALL I NEED to KNOW From this point we are TOGETHER”.

The central story of this book, and a thread that holds it together, is the importance of elsewhere to the young Amy and Eddie. To soothe the troubled Amy to sleep Eddie incites her to imagine they are on a raft, away from their problems and safe from everyone. When Amy gets a job in an advertising agency she is put in charge of the ads for the Isle of Wight radio station, to her mind the island is a placed filled with people “looking down, wide-eyed, at the sea, while they hum nervously, listening to their wind up radios and weaving or whittling, or whatever Island people do”. As her colleagues start to peel away on their annual holidays, Amy starts to imagine that they might be the kind of people that could go away on holiday, to this island where people “have things to weave, things to whittle or whatever island people do…”. In fact it is their trip to the Isle of Wight that proves the catalyst for their eventual break up and their epiphany that they can move elsewhere, see other things, have other jobs, love other people.

Steven Horry’s illustrations do a wonderful job of conveying quite how momentous a decision it is for Amy who can rarely, according to her own confession, “get through a full supermarket shop without having a nervous breakdown” to go on holiday with Eddie. A full two page spread of the couple approaching the ferry to the Isle of Wight is divided into four horizontal panels to convey their indecision about running to make the ferry they are on the point of missing, while the decision to print the first pages about their arrival on the island in colour is a fantastic way to share with the reader the sensory overload that Amy and Eddie are experiencing, contrasting sharply as it does with their difficult home life.

The narrative is interspersed with postcards sent by the older Eddie and Amy to their younger selves, often witty, sometimes wistful and sad, these postcards provide a neat summary of their relationship and their different takes on this joint holiday. Amy cites one of her reasons for embarking on this project her interest in the different ways in which she and Eddie remember this holiday. Indeed she initially contacted him hoping he could fill in the gaps in her patchy memories of the trip. Amy remembers a trip on a Galleon ride at the island’s theme park as sending her into a flat panic as she screamed and sobbed her way through it, in Eddie’s memories of the event “Amy was crying with laughter the whole time. I haven’t seen her so happy in ages”. These differences in their own memories of their holiday help flesh out Amy and Eddie as characters within the book and bring to life their younger selves for the reader.

When they return from their holidays Amy charts the swift downfall of their relationship, she and Eddie drift further and further apart. Their arguments get worse, he proposes in the wake of a row with a ring fashioned from tin foil. They run out of money and spend Christmas Day in darkness, along in their flat, later she tries to break the coffee table to use as fuel on the fire and they surround themselves with friends and parties as they try to plug the holes in their relationship.

The Islanders is one of the most poignant books I have read in ages, it beautifully charts the rise and fall of young love and the way in which it incorporates the various different narrative styles, song, monologue, image, postcard, effectively creates a collage that reflects the patchwork of memories that Amy and Eddie have cobbled together of this period in their lives.

#135 - Raw Power & Grand Gestures - Thoughts on the Small Press Revival

damon — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 22:27:45 +0000

There are always new ways to experience comics. Last week Hattie mentioned Literary Death Match, a mixing of comics with performance which included live on-stage drawing. This is a subject close to my heart as I have hosted a few comics/art/performance events in Dundee under the banner DeeCAP. I have also written on comics and performance for Comics Forum. A few weeks earlier David wrote about correlations between comics and the internet and then Scott brought up comics as educational tools.

However, sometimes is great just to go back to good old fashioned stapled pamphlets made from photocopied and folded sheets of A4 paper (near enough to letter size, North American readers). Recently there has been a resurgence in small press comics, whether this is a low-fi reaction against the acceptance of ‘graphic novels’ as literary fare with their attendant hardback fanciness or a kicking against the digital pricks of publishers such as Comixology is still up for debate - in fact, it is probably a bit of both and more. As an aside, I was perfectly happy with my paperback copy of Fun Home so I was slightly disappointed that Alison Bechdel’s follow up book Are you my Mother? only came out in hardback. Hey comics, stop playing by someone else’s rules!

This revival is perhaps best exemplified by Box Brown’s Retrofit Comics, who have been publishing ‘high quality staple-bound comics on a regular basis’ since 2011, and Charles Forsman with his micro-publishing empire Oily Comics. Both of these publishers write and draw comics themselves and this, alongside publishing other people’s work, helps to make sure the floppy survives distinct from monthly superhero titles.

[caption id="attachment_3168" align="aligncenter" width="697"] Retrofit Comics: We Will Remain - Andrew White, Raw Power 2 - Josh Bayer, Grand Gestures - Simon Moreton[/caption] Retrofit Comics come in a variety of sizes and paper stocks to suit the individual author. Simon Moreton’s minimalist Grand Gestures is slightly smaller than standard comic book size and comes with a matt two-colour cover. We Will Remain by Andrew White is slightly smaller with a full colour yet muted cover, while Josh Bayer’s magazine sized Raw Power 2 has a garish day-glo glossy cover and is printed on newsprint, bringing to mind comics like Peter Bagge’s Neat Stuff and punk fanzine Maximum Rocknroll. Forsman, a graduate of The Centre for Cartoon Studies in Vermont, publishes Oily Comics in that quarter letter size fanzine format that makes each book exciting to grab a hold of and flick through the photocopied pages. There is always a danger of a paper cut or roughly cut edges. The bluntness of the Oily guillotine only adding to the materiality of these ephemeral little booklets. Opening an envelope from Oily is always intriguing as I’m never sure who will be featured; among my favourites so far are Outside by Marc Geddes & Warren Craghead, Lou by Melissa Mendes, and Josh Simmons’ Training. [caption id="attachment_3169" align="aligncenter" width="620"] Oily Comics: Outside - Marc Geddes & Warren Craghead, Lou - Melissa Mendes, Middle Ground - Andy Burkholder, Training - Josh Simmons, Not a Horse Girl - Marian Runk.[/caption] These comics are available in comics shops but, living in Scotland they are hard to find, so I have subscriptions to both publishers ensuring regular letterbox drops of comics. The internet and online payment companies make ordering small press comics from around the world very, very simple - using modern technology to get a fix of good old fashioned printed paper. Interestingly both publishers also release digital versions of their comics, although with Retrofit, I think only as an addition to the print subscription.

The materiality is nothing though if the contents are not up to scratch and so far neither publisher has disappointed, I may like some comics more than others but they are always interesting. Perhaps the most successful book so far is Forsman’s own The End Of The Fucking World or TEOTFW. Described on the cover as a blend of Bonnie and Clyde and Paranoid Park, the minimally drawn tale mixes nihilistic teenage boredom and crime, and looks to me like Terrence Malick’s Badlands starring the cast of Peanuts.

[caption id="attachment_3178" align="alignleft" width="240"] James & Alyssa from The End Of The Fucking World[/caption]

First serialised by Oily, TEOTFW is now available in a collected edition from Fantagraphics and thankfully they haven’t messed with the format too much. The complete edition is only about 10% larger than the original minis - still no bigger than my hands. Being published by Fantagraphics feels like the mainstream these days but TEOTFW has broken through even further; it was recently announced that the book is being made into a series of internet shorts by the British broadcaster Film4.0.

These are exciting times for small press comics, and this is being marked by Comics Forum with their Small Press and Undergrounds: A Conference on Comics in Leeds, UK in November. Graphixia will be in attendance to host a panel discussing the work we have achieved so far, such as this blog and our successful Comics & the Multimodal World conference in June this year, and then looking to the future. The panel is titled Small is the New Big: The Comics Criticism Blog as Small Press, we hope you can make it along.

#136 Homestuck and Why It Wouldn't Work as a Paper Comic

sophie — Thu, 03 Oct 2013 03:32:36 +0000

This article will be in the form of a beefed-out top five list, so each item is a paragraph. Homestuck is in no way mine, it belongs to (the amazing) Andrew Hussie. You can find Homestuck at mspaintadventures.com. Without further ado, let's get started!

Reason five: the little kid population of earth. Five year olds are at an age where they can't search the internet on their own. However, they can pick out their own books. Just picture this: a five year old is looking through their Elementary School library. (up to grade seven, so yes Homestuck could be here. The Princess Diaries and Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants are decidedly more mature and they're in my school library.) Their eye is caught by a brightly-coloured illustration of, say, Nepeta, the adorable cat-troll on the front of a Homestuck book which the school librarian didn't read and decided couldn't possibly be mature. They take the book out and as soon as they open it are confronted by a world of swearing, violence, and complicated concepts. Plus they will be deeply disturbed by buckets for the rest of their life and the sand castle stage will be cut short. They will also see some of the more creepy characters and scream when they see someone who looks a little like them. (Which I guess probably wouldn't happen though, because you don't exactly see someone with gray skin and a zodiac sign on their shirt walking down Commercial Drive.) Their writing skills may also be deeply impacted in an attempt to wriite liike 2ollux or 2omethiing, two. Or, to a lesser extent, KARKAT or GaMzEe. :33 > Or to a similar extent as Sollux, Nepeta. OR T3R3Z1. Okay, that's enough. It also has puns they wouldn't understand (even I had to look up some of them on MSPA wiki before I got them), such as Karkat's trollian handle, carcinoGenetecist, which is a pun and not just weird because he represents the zodiac sign Cancer, which is also my zodiac sign, thus the most awesome.

Reason four: the style. The style Homestuck is written in would just be a little weird. Due to its “mock game” format, it would most likely be considered a picture book instead of a comic, which it definitely isn't. It's a comic. A teenager comic. And there are no teenager picture books. I can't really write more on the subject, so here's the first page as an example.

See? That would be kind of weird as a paper comic page.

Reason three: the copyright deal. Homestuck uses several trademarked items. The Amazing Andrew Hussie might be sued if he made profit off it, we wouldn't want that happening. Especially seeing as it's not just casually mentioning them, and the story just wouldn't be the same without John’s deep hatred of Betty Crocker or the Wayward Vagabond's obsession with Tab soda.

Reason two: music. Homestuck is a very complete and high-tech webcomic. It includes music. Awesome music. Such as my favourite track, Ohgodwhat. I also like the Ohgodwhat remix. But this isn't about my taste in music. It's about how Homestuck just wouldn't be the same without it.

Reason one: flash animation. Homestuck is also complete with dramatic, amazing, rainbowly colourful flash animations. They are just one more thing to thank Hussie for. They are in every way beautiful. I would put one here, however I am writing this on OpenOffice, which I'm pretty sure can't have flash animations inserted into it.

I hope you enjoy and understand! ~Sophie

#137 What I Hate--Overly Saturated Art

wilkinsp — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 21:53:12 +0000

I have a hard time writing about things I don’t like. I’m not that kind of critic. I’d much rather explain how something works than what I dislike about it. So when David said that our next Graphixia topic should be “things we hate,” I balked. When I write about what I don’t like I feel like a jerk, and as if to compund that feeling, someone always chimes in to say how I am misguided, if not dead wrong. Furthermore, from teaching and parenting, I’ve learned that it’s counterproductive to tell students and kids that what they like stinks. If you want to listen to Taylor Swift or Owl City, go ahead; just because it’s not my cup of tea shouldn’t prevent your enjoyment. And when it comes to comics, fans of such a maligned medium ought to hesitate before dismissing examples of it as lacking quality. The thing is, taste connects the subjective and the universal. This is what Kant was on about when he said there was a bridge between moral and aesthetic judgment, having to do with the categorical imperative. That is, when we decide that something is “right” or “beautiful” we can only do so by asking ourselves whether it is “right” or “beautiful” for everyone else as well. This step in judgement is how we know we aren’t being perverse or self-interested. It is important to remember that the imperative is on us as judges not on other people. They don’t have to agree with us; the reflection is simply a check on our own judgment. When we share our tastes with someone else, it is an invitation, not an imperative. If I tell someone that this book, song, comic, work of art is beautiful, it is an invitation for them to like it too. They aren’t obliged to like it; they can say no thank you, I’m not fond of that, the same way they might talk about eggplant. Most conflagrations on the internet over whether something is good are bad seem to me to arise out of misunderstandings of aesthetic imperatives and invitations. So when I discuss “hating” the kind of comic art I am about to discuss, I’m aware that others might like it, and I’m also aware that what I hate about it is as much about me as about the art. So, to get to the point, what I hate is overly-saturated art in comics, by which I mean art that is glossy, detailed, and ornately coloured, almost “photographic” in its appearance. The reason I hate it is because it strikes me that in adding too much detail it takes away from the key virtue of comic art: the way it conveys information (aesthetic and otherwise) by stripping away detail. Archaeologists draw what they find rather than photograph it (or as well as photographing it) because the photograph presents too much information at the expense of the specific information the archeologist wants to convey. The photograph lacks a certain discrimination. Comics function according to the same principle. To be correct and fair, the problem I am referring to in comics stems more from colouring the art rather than the line drawing itself, and possibly has to do with the use of computers in the colouring process. I have nothing against the use of computers in artwork but they do allow for doing things because you can do them rather than because you should. The example that made me think of this hatred is Mind the Gap, an Image series written by Jim McCann and drawn by Rodin Esquejo. I actually find the series engaging, on a narrative level: the main character has been attacked at a subway station and is in a coma. She finds herself inhabiting a kind of limbo between life and death, a limbo defined by a house and a cast of characters. She is able to look down on her hospital bed to see the actions of her family and friends, and even inhabit the bodies of other patients in the hospital. It’s a neat conceit, spoiled by the “too muchness” of the art, which to me is like overly-produced music. One of the reason I like comics is the medium’s rawness: the need to produce so many pictures to fill so many pages lends itself to a rough an ready feel that I find engaging. When a comic lacks that feel, it is as if we are moving into another medium. The phenomenon reminds me of a review I read of Stiff Little Fingers’ album Go For It many years ago, the gist of which was, it’s a shame a punk band doesn’t necessarily get better when they become more proficient with their instruments. I also find that art like this detracts from rather than enhances the multimodal aspect of comics. True, we are still dealing with words and images, but because the art is so saturated, the embedding of other comics features such as signs and labels gets left out. At the other end of the spectrum, consider the work of Brandon Graham who makes every page a jam-packed collection of embedded text and images. Graham’s work is much more challenging to look at and therefore more rewarding. Graham’s work illuminates the links among comics, graffiti, signs, and labels; it’s not just about glossy images. The “smiley face” in Watchmen, does something similar, reminding us that Moore and Gibbons’ work is engaged with multiple visual signification systems. (Mind the Gap invokes the London Underground with its title and occasional use of the station symbol, but not significantly so; in fact it’s confusing because the story is set in New York.) For me it’s a fine line between art that is “clean” and art that is over the top. For instance I’m a big admirer of Jamie McKelvie’s work in Phonogram, where the art is hardly sketchy, but the absence of colour keeps it “comicky.” In Young Avengers Volume 2 that McKelvie also worked on with Phonogram writer Kieron Gillen, the addition of colour brings the visual experience close to that of Mind the Gap. But a playfulness with form that matches the playfulness of the writing saves it from tipping over into the over-saturated category. In such cases, the art redeems itself by moving beyond the aim of “looking good” towards meaning making. David Aja and Javier Pulido's work with Matt Fraction in Hawkeye self-consciously reclaims a certain style of “primitive” comics art in an age of computer generated glossiness, though for all I know, Aja and Pulido’s work might be heavily dependent on computers! Elsewhere in Graphixia David has celebrated Aja and Pulido’s work, but what appeals to me is its “flat” style: it has a lot in common with the new iOS 7 design. This style is less dependent on the photographic image (with it’s excess of information) and more on the iconic image that strips away superfluous information so we can get at what’s important. The emphasis on the iconic also makes the page structure of the comic more significant. In Mind the Gap page structure seems arbitrary, just a way of putting these glossy pictures together. In Hawkeye page structure and image work together in a meaningful way. Flat style draws attention to page structure while photographic structure distracts from it. Come to think of it, McKelvie and Gillen’s work emphasizes page structure as well. When I read Mind the Gap on ComiXology, I don’t feel the need to look at the whole page. But when I read Hawkeye, I spend a little time surveying the page as a whole before moving to panel view, because I know the time is well-spent. So…that’s what I hate. I hope someone comes along with a corrective to my view of the art in Mind the Gap. In the end, I’d rather hear someone else talk about why they like it, than me talk about why I hate it. Works Cited Hawkeye #4. Matt Fraction (writer) and Javier Pulido (artist). Marvel 2012. Mind the Gap #4. Jim McCann (writer) and Rodin Esquejo (artist). Image 2012. Multiple Warheads: Alphabet to Infinity #1. Brandon Graham (writer and artist). Image 2012. Young Avengers #2. Kieron Gillen (writer) and Jamie McKelvie and Mike Norton (artists). Marvel 2013.

#138 - The Rinse and Repeat of Comics: Control, Alternate, Delete

admin — Thu, 24 Oct 2013 22:04:17 +0000

Despite how others might perceive my personality, I don’t hate much; I am however constantly irritated by so many things. One of the things that gets to me is repetition, especially when it comes in response to an opportunity for significant change. A few qualifiers right off the bat: 1) this is not going to be a rant about what I hate about a particular comic, but I will point to a particular comic in order to make my case. The case applies to everything. 2) This isn’t a rant, but a legitimate concern about how we define the legitimacy and evolution of comics–however we define it. I’m not making a claim about how we’ll define comics, if we’ll define comics, or that we need to define comics. It begins and ends with Superman, because comics, to some extent, began and will end with Superman. That character is always part of the conversation. No matter how hard we try to get him out of the conversation, there he is hiding in the phone booth, trying to change, only to emerge in the same blueish suit, with some yellow accents, a cape–usually red–and that massive “S” on his chest. And this is the point. Take DC comics–its moniker a lame rethinking of “Detective Comics”–and their “New 52,” often referred to as a “reboot.” Y’know “reboot” your computer? When it’s frozen and won’t work anymore, so you start it up again in the hopes that it will return to normal again. You sit there and you pray that everything will return to normal and not be all screwed up and not working. You put absolute faith in that reboot getting you back to exactly where you were when things were okay. You don’t do it so that everything will change–that’s your worst nightmare. And herein lies the problem with comics: they don’t change, they just say they’re changing. With the New 52, DC had a real opportunity to revisit some of its characters (I don’t need them to do it to all of them) and make some real changes, but no. Even the inaugural cover harkens back to the original Superman Action Comics #1 as if to further entrench the “we’re saying we’re changing! But don’t worry, we’re not changing just re-drawing! See, you know Action Comics #1 right? This is the same only more close!” The loss of the panicked guy in the lower left-hand corner of Action Comics #1 in the New 52 meant that I couldn’t point to an apt symbol for my own sarcastic reaction to the reboot. Suffice to say, that’s me reacting to the idea that the New 52 means anything but the same old same old. Of course, most of the objection to the New 52 is that it does away with the numbers that connect the comics to the past: "don't change!" Even the heroes themselves don’t change. Look at Supes and Batman and Wonder Woman: Pretty much the same as always. White, tall, handsome, muscled. How about we take a look at the physics of living on a planet with huge gravity like Krypton had, what effect would that have on the body. How big does Superman’s chest have to be to accommodate a heart that can pump blood around a body under that much gravitational pressure? Yeah, we’re gonna make him the same. What would so much time in the water do too Aquaman’s hair? Would he have hair? How would that work? Naw, a bald Aquaman will confuse our readers about the intentions of the New 52. Wonder Woman: how does an Amazon woman really look; how might a really fine muscled woman look? Ummmm, no. She has to be sexy too. All this to say, that we like at times to sit around and laud comics for being nostalgia, unchanging. I’ve even written about how comics actually do really cool things within the constraints of repeated origin stories. Umberto Eco wrote a really famous essay about how Superman stays the same and what that means. In some ways, what’s great about comics is that they don’t change. Peter Parker is still Peter Parker. That said, let’s stop talking about how Peter Parker was a really innovative turn in character for comics. That was 1962. What’s changed? And don’t say Venom–that’s just a colourist without colours. Some will gleefully point to “The Graphic Novel” and “Slice of Life” comics. Or trot out the old standards: The Dark Knight, Watchmen, and Sin City; fantastic innovations all, but more refiguring of the same. The bottom line is that the basic format of comics–even with its move to digital–has not changed significantly since the beginning. Chris Ware, one of the labelled “innovators” is commended for releasing a box full of references to comics’ past and Art Spiegelman’s Maus, for all its triumphs, still uses strict panel formats and alludes to the cat and mouse trope that often defines the medium. After all our innovations, shifts, reboots, we’re still dealing with “books,” “frames,” “gutters,” and I think, like the rebooted computer screen, we’re happy to see things that way again. Perhaps being unchanging is part of becoming an established media. That said, it also means nothing’s happening, nothing’s moving, nothing’s doing. As we continue to debate comics’ legitimacy and assert its position as an evolutionary medium that can respond to the cultural currents of our time, we need to acknowledge its stasis. At some point, if comics is to be taken seriously as a form of cultural representation or commentary, we’re going to have to acknowledge that we need to move forward and really change things up in a significant way, either in response to a mediated shift–ibooks!–or because something else will come along–who plays video games anyway?–and steals our resonance. Ctrl-Alt-Delete / Ctrl-Alt-Delete / Ctrl-Alt-Delete (I’m using a Mac).

#139 No One Cares About Your Neuroses (and other tales)

Grayb — Tue, 29 Oct 2013 16:04:47 +0000

I wasn't at the meeting where we decided we were all going to write about things we hate this cycle. In fact, the only thing I really hate is spending a lot of time and energy talking about things I don't like. As I have discussed in other forums, I am mostly in this for the enthusiasm. I am far more this than this . But bowing to peer pressure, I've been spending a lot of time this week thinking about what I hate, and I've come to the conclusion that the thing I hate most in the world of comics scholarship is the obsessive hand-wringing about whether or not comics are worthy of scholarship. As my fellow Graphixian Hattie noted the other day on the Twitters, "Neuroticism is an unattractive quality in a person, let alone a discipline." Look around Twitter, blogs, conferences, department meetings, faculty colloquia -- in all these spaces you will find extended discussion of comics and their worth or lack of worth as an object of academic study. We spend a lot of time being anxious about whether comics studies is seen as legitimate, whether comics are seen as valuable in our classrooms, whether people understand why we teach with comics, whether people respect comics, whether people respect comics for the right reasons, whether people understand comics studies... sometimes we're so freaking introspective that it's amazing we find time to actually engage with comics themselves. We're trying to justify our own existence. And we need to stop. The reality is that we study comics for the same reasons we study anything else: because it's there, because it seems to us to be doing something interesting, and because we have something to say. And that's enough. There are generally two audiences for these conversations about the role of comics within academic discourse: those who agree with you (see: most Twitter discussion) and those who don't (see: many department meetings). I'm not sure either one of these conversations is productive. In the first, we make ourselves feel a lot better but don't engage with those outside our world -- which while more interdisciplinary than many fields, is small. We come up with more and more illustrious reasons for why we do what we do and we feel good about our field. In the second, the audience is probably not ready to be receptive and not interested in the reasons why we study comics. The proof for the non-believer is in producing a body of work and developing the discipline over time. This isn't to say that all of us who engage in these conversations (and I'm not excluding myself from this as I've been known to justify my existence a time or twelve) aren't also producing good work -- of course we do -- but I can't help but think that the energy we spend on rehashing the same conversations about the state and worth of the discipline would be better spent developing the discipline itself. Indeed, I think our willingness to talk at length about why we exist actually hurts our calls for legitimacy -- if we think we need to justify comics studies, it will be ever thus. You know who never walks into an English department and justifies his or her existence? The Chaucerian. The Renaissance guy. The Americanist. The French New Wave gal doesn't explain herself to a film department. No one asks the Social Historian why he's doing what he does. The worthiness of the Psychopharmacologist in inborn. These scholars have a space and they take it. I think it's time we take our space, and the first step is not engaging in debates of worthiness. We're worthy because we exist and have something interesting to say. Now it's time to say it: let's talk about the work.

#140 How Many Covers Does This Issue Have? Variants and the Commoditization of Comics

smarsden — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 10:28:04 +0000

I’d like to preface this post with the statement that the attributes that I love about comics are legion: their inspiring artistry that frequently carries a subtextual message, their ability make the fantastic appear plausible, their captivating way of immediately allowing us to suspend reality in pursuit of higher meanings, their revisioning of typical literature that draws others in to create new readerships who would otherwise never engage with novels. That said, there are aspects of their production that I find detestable and detrimental to the industry as a whole. My main gripe, which I voice to anyone who has the patience to listen to me on the subject, is the modern variant cover. What follows is a very nerdy history of variants in mainstream comic books – mea culpa for the very obvious fetishization. Variants have a long tradition in comics, and they were all at one point long sought after commodities and part of the reason that comics as physical collectibles were so desirable. The earliest in my recollection which are agreed upon variants to collectors are the GRR (Golden Record Reprint) versions of Fantastic Four #1, Amazing Spider-Man #1, Journey Into Mystery #86 (the first appearance of Thor) and Avengers #1 that appeared in the 1960s. These were identical copies of their source material released shortly after the original issues, identifiable only because they were missing the price on the cover and because they were packaged with a vinyl recording of the dialogue (with sound effects!) of the issue – one could say these were the precursor to the multimedia comics that we see today. Fascinating pieces of comics’ history all, and while not worth the same dollar figure as the originals, still highly longed for in the comic collecting community, particularly when still sealed. Other examples of variants that followed in the early 1970s are of dubious value and intrigue, mostly having to do with misprints and double covers (some of which I own), though both DC and Marvel started producing alternate versions of comic covers in the later 70s that they could not have known would be sought after during this period decades later: for a short period, Whitman acquired the rights to distribute a number of DC titles, prompting them to change the DC logo on the cover to a Whitman logo for the purpose of advertising the fact (many of which I own). While not covering DC’s entire canon, Whitman distributed its flagship titles which included at the time Action Comics, Superman, Batman, Green Lantern and DC Comics Presents among others. Marvel had its own variants during the same period, though these are less interesting; commonly called “price variants,” these were alternate versions that were test cases to see if the comic buying audience would still purchase titles if the price was increased by a nickel. The result is a very limited print run of several titles released in select cities that bore a price of 35 cents instead of 30 – some titles that are already highly collectible have price variants, including Star Wars #1 and three issues of the very early stages of the Chris Claremont X-Men run (#s 98, 99 and 100), and when professionally graded these comics can be worth up to fifteen times the value of the regular issues. We don’t see variants of any kind in comics in the early to mid 80’s with two notable exceptions: DC’s Justice League #3 and Firestorm #61 (neither of which I own, sadly). These were again very limited release, as they were test cases for DC’s potential new logo, when they were seeing if the market would take to entirely rebranding DC Comics as Superman Comics. Needless to say, the test did not go well, and DC kept its moniker to this day. Again, the scarcity of these issues, even though they occur in storylines in which nothing of note happens, makes them very interesting curiosities in collecting. One other variant worth mentioning is Batman #428, “A Death in the Family” part three, which had a different newsstand cover than the cover released to the newly arising collector comic book stores. The sidebar on the cover read “Robin finds his Mother. And waiting is the Joker, planning a revenge that is swift, violent, terrible. Can Robin survive?” The newsstand version has a UPC code directly underneath, but the direct market version bears the line “you will decide – details on back cover.” Collectors were given the opportunity to phone in their vote as to whether or not Robin would be killed off in the issue, making the cover a first acknowledgement that comics were starting to respond to the new marketplace. Two versions of Batman #428 were produced for the following month, and the one that went to press saw the death of Robin based on the popular vote. This was the last real variant of the decade, and it’s significant as the ploy garnered much media attention, catching the eye of those who saw comics far more as commodities than as inherently valuable for the quality of their narratives. Enter the 90s, the decade which nearly ended production of mainstream comic books on the whole. Once the collector market became firmly established and communities and conventions began to occur all across North America based on collecting scarce issues, both DC and Marvel attempted to capitalize on the dynamics of this changing fan base with a glut of variant covers for comics that they knew would be strong sellers regardless. Early standouts here were Jim Lee’s X-Men #1, with five different covers (including a gatefold) and Todd McFarlane’s Spider-Man #1 with several versions variously polybagged and employing gold and silver ink. DC followed suit, and during the first half of the decade nearly every comic where any major event occurred, the publishers would release two or three covers of each issue, with special features ranging from embossing, holograms, plastic jewels glued on the covers, polybagging and die-cutting. With comics still being relatively inexpensive, collectors bought these in the hundreds, sometimes thousands, hoping for particular issues to increase in value. For a short time they did, and I personally remember buying multiple copies of the “death” of Superman in issue #75 (polybagged with a button, poster and black armband) which I sold shortly after for a 2,500% markup – and at those prices, who could blame some collectors for treating comics like stocks? Many did, after all, outperform anything that the NYSE was offering at the time, and I have to admit that I'm guilty of contributing to the variant craze at the time. Of course, this overproduction couldn’t last, and with mass print runs unlike anything comics had seen before in its history, the scarcity of comics was at an end – the new breed of “collector” was often sitting on thousands of copies of particular issues hoping for their value to increase, never engaging with the stories at all. The companies became bloated and reliant on the extra income, and when variants ceased to be desirable due to overproduction, the market collapsed in on itself nearly forcing Marvel into bankruptcy. The industry learned its lesson, for a time, and variants became a taboo amongst the comic collecting community, as those of us who remained collectors because of the stories, art and concepts in comics begrudged the fact that we had nearly lost the medium due to corporate greed and a commoditization of the industry that had reached levels of absurdity. To this day, if you were to bring in a collection to a comic store with the intent to sell and you mentioned that they were produced in the 90’s, every store owner would turn you away due both to their overproduction in the period and an underlying contempt for the industry during the period. The late 90’s / very early 2000’s saw a return to storytelling, with variants being practically non-existent – both of the Big Two remembered how close they had come to ending comics entirely, and print runs became far more modest. By the mid 2000’s, however, marketers began to find a way to exploit the collector’s market once again, this time with more caution, leading into the variant concern that I have with comics produced today. Though the odd alternate cover was produced with certain key issues, the first major collectible variant came from DC, with its Batman #608. A “Retailer Round table Program” (RRP) alternate cover was released only to key comic book store owners with whom DC met to discuss marketing strategies – the cover, a gorgeous piece drawn by Jim Lee, became immediately collectible due both to the quality of the art and the extreme scarcity of the issue (a print run of about 500 copies). When the collector’s market responded by driving the price of the issue up to, at times, over $1,000, both DC and Marvel began to experiment with a larger variety of “retailer incentive” variant covers. While starting slowly with only key issues being attempted, retailers would receive variants based on the number of regular covers ordered. Early attempts saw these being distributed at the ratio of 1:10 and 1:25, making them again commodities for both those outside and inside the collector community – Marvel’s Civil War, which we’ve discussed a few time on Graphixia, was notable culprit here, with 1:10 variants and 1:25 sketch variants being released for each issue. Of course, this had a negative impact on the rest of the issues, as retailers knew they would be able to sell their variants at a higher price to collectors and would therefore order what they knew would ultimately become overstock in order to hit targets that would get them more copies of the alternate covers. And now, today: Comics have once again come dangerously close to repeating the same mistake that nearly destroyed the industry in the 90’s. Retailer incentive variants are released with nearly every issue of flagship series from both publishers, and the order targets have gotten much higher – it is not unusual to see variants released at a ratio of 1:100 and even 1:200. DC very recently released fifty-two 3D lenticular covers for all of its series (which are actually all stunning due to the new technologies employed in their creation, the effects of which are unfortunately impossible to reproduce here), and they produce versions of several of their most popular titles with alternate covers that are polybagged with a codes for digital downloads of the issue. While this is frustrating for both a collector and reader of comics who wants the industry to survive another decade, the trend towards a complete revisitation of the 90’s is keenly apparent this month in particular. What prompted this post was actually not a release from either DC or Marvel, but from Image Comics which publishes the Walking Dead. Issue #100 of the series was recently released, with eight variant covers by some of comics most popular artists (all available at 1:1) and a chromium cover (plasticized with silver ink), with an accompanying 1:200 retailer incentive. This month, on the series’ ten year anniversary, Image has released Walking Dead #115 with no less than fifteen variants: ten interlocking covers that create a single poster-sized image, a blank cover, an NYCC cover and two other incentives. The total print run for the issue is over 350,000. This is not to say that the other players are not equally to blame in attempting to force overproduction again – a few months ago, DC released Justice League of America #1, with over 250,000 copies in print due to 52 different covers, one for each state flag (plus Puerto Rico and the American flag). While I definitely enjoy the original concept of variants in comic books, as a collector I prize them for the stories that surround their production as well as their scarcity. The early variants in comics’ history prompt an exploration of comics as a medium and reveal interesting characteristics of both their production and experimentation with form, creating a narrative of comics as physical objects that can exist parallel to the stories contained within them. What is currently happening in the industry highlights that comics’ fanbase is being exploited by publishers that are attempting a final hurrah in terms of sales under the looming threat (though it’s been looming for quite some time) of the death of print publication. When comics become treated solely as material goods by collectors and investors alike, an inevitable crash follows that has a twofold effect: firstly, it jeopardizes the viability of the companies that create them, and secondly it makes comics appear – particularly to the outside observer – to be the products of a juvenile industry bent solely on capital gains and not the production of art. I certainly love the materiality of comics, though not if it comes at the cost of their reputation and perhaps even the industry as a whole.

#127 A Scottish Scrooge: Anthropomorphic Meaness in Walt Disney's Scrooge McDuck

admin — Tue, 30 Jul 2013 22:42:16 +0000

#128 Jeffrey Brown grows up: Maturity, Adulthood and A Matter Of Life

admin — Tue, 06 Aug 2013 05:31:59 +0000

#129 A Day in the Life on the Farm with Jason Turner: Or Why I Am So Dumb

admin — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 02:59:27 +0000

Mostly I was just bored. I’m not really sure what the point of the comic was. It wasn’t all about the world building (the way Finder is at times), at least not enough to be interesting on its own. It wasn’t really about the characters. It didn’t have much of a plot. It wasn’t poetic or just aesthetically beautiful. It was more like a part of something bigger that got hacked down to short comic size. A lot of narrative comics seem to have that trouble, like people don’t want to spend the time/effort to really do the narrative, or they can’t quite edit out in a way to make it work, but they still want to tell a story.

#133 Alienated by the Strip: Daniel Clowes’s Comic-Strip Novel Ice Haven

admin — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 05:38:55 +0000

#134 "Its time for us to get out of this town" - Musings on 'The Islanders' by Amy Mason

admin — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 22:19:25 +0000

#135 Raw Power & Grand Gestures - Thoughts on the Small Press Revival

admin — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 22:27:45 +0000

[caption id="attachment_3178" align="alignleft" width="240"] James & Alyssa from The End Of The Fucking World[/caption]

#138 The Rinse and Repeat of Comics: Control, Alternate, Delete

admin — Thu, 24 Oct 2013 22:04:17 +0000

#141 Hattie's Hates

hattiek — Wed, 13 Nov 2013 21:48:05 +0000

I have to admit that I do not have the same issues with hatred as Peter and Brenna do, I am, on a relatively regular basis, a great big ball of irrational rage and hatred. I once, on a similar blog to this, dedicated many many hours and thousands of words to explaining in great detail just how much I hated JJ Abrams and all his works. To this day if plied with enough gin and wound up just enough I will recite that post word for word at any poor, unsuspecting friend who happens to mention Lost at just the wrong moment, (what can I say, I took Cloverfield badly). Despite my love of a good chunk of righteous outrage and annoyance and my propensity for hating on anyone who I deem to have chewed a bit too loudly, breathed a bit too heavily or looked at my cat funnily, I have to admit to having struggled to find something to hate for this post. My original reading of the theme was that we were going to try to re-read something we had previously hated or struggled with and look at why we had had that response and to see whether engaging critically with our original response might help us to appreciate the work. However, the rest of Team Graphixia seem to have picked specific things that they hate and since I feel incapable of narrowing it down to just one I am going to write a list. Whilst I would love to embark on a list entitled “Hattie’s Hundred Hates” in which I list one hundred things I hate about comics, I don’t quite have the time. So here’s my top ten (in no particular order) to whet your appetite!

The fact that Wizard’s tagline was for sometime “The #1 Men’s Pop Culture Magazine”.
The fact that you can’t state on the internet that certain creators’ latest works are a.) a bit racist, b.) a bit sexist, c.) not very good, d.) very bad indeed, without getting shouted at a lot by people who are very resistant to reasoned debate.
Rubbish tie-in comics. I hate that comics are seen as a cheap and trendy thing to tie into promotional efforts. For example the terrible mousemat I had to use at my last job that depicted the efforts of the superheroes from our printing suppliers who could provide all of our merchandise in a flash!
Comics shops that are so busy selling toys and tat that they hide their comics away at the back of the shop. This does not make a pleasant shopping experience and makes me about 12 times less likely to come and spend much of my pay cheque in your shop.
Gratuitously graphic violence/sexual violence, just because you can draw or write a comic in which truly horrendous things happen to people, doesn’t mean that you should. (Mark Miller I am looking at you.)
Crappy adaptations of classic literary texts that have clearly been made just to exploit parents worried they will never get their kids to read the GCSE set texts otherwise. Just because it’s a comic doesn’t mean it is any easier to read than the original. If Shakespeare’s plays are going to be adapted into comic book form then they deserve to be done in the best possible way, with artists and writers that have time and money to do them justice.
People correcting themselves when they ask if I am reading a comic by saying “Oh sorry, do you prefer the term graphic novel” in a snide tone of voice. Normally I would like to respond with a pithy “I would prefer you to go away” but I normally mumble something about the term comics being fine and try to avoid making eye contact with this person I now have to hate.
The guided viewing thing on digital comics viewers. I really, really, really dislike the motion as it swoops and zooms from panel to panel. Firstly it makes me feel nauseous; secondly I don’t like being told what to do/having my reading controlled by a computer. (Why, yes I do have control issues).
The fact that even though I agree 100% with everything Brenna said last week I still found myself justifying my existence as a comics scholar this morning.
Exclusive fandom, by which I mean, the kind of comics fans who don’t seem to want to share something they love with their friends but rather want to keep it to themselves. If I like something then I want everyone I know and love to like it too, which is why I have purchased dozens of copies of Michel Rabagliati books for friends’ birthdays and given Cheryl Strayed’s Wild as a present three times in the last six weeks. I love comics, I think some of my friends would really like some of my favourite comics, I don’t expect them to pass an initiation test to prove that they are comics fans before I will respect their opinions about the one, two, fifteen or seventy comics that they have read and want to discuss with me. (P.S. I don’t have a clue what colour Peter Parker’s shoes were in issue 43 of Spiderman and I like comics so much that one day I am going to have written a whole PhD about them).

So there you go, a fairly hefty list of Hattie’s Hates. I feel like I am on such a roll now that I might even manage to make it one hundred after all.

#142 Is it just me? My problem with Jeffrey Brown

damon — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 12:05:00 +0000

As Hattie remarked last week one of the ways in which we Graphixians discussed engaging with the things we hate about comics was to revisit a text that we had previously dismissed as uninteresting or that we strongly disliked. In discussions with Graphixia guest poster Paddy Johnston at the recent Transitions conference in London, he challenged me to look again at a book that I had almost thrown across the room with rage when I first read it (the only book I have actually throw across the room out of sheer annoyance is Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, a book that may have suffered by being read immediately after Don DeLillo's Underworld) I originally thought I would write about typography in comics this week. One of my personal bugbears is the use of badly designed digital type with hand-drawn artwork, which has such a jarring, distracting effect that it will put me off what otherwise may be a decent comic. I say decent as such scant attention to detail means to me that the comic can't be excellent. I'm not against digital type, it can be used well and is often disguised as handwriting, Graphixia interviewee Allan Haverholm is an expert in this field. However, I decided to take Paddy up on his challenge and reread Clumsy by Jeffrey Brown. What put me off Brown's comic in the first place? Hmmm, where to start... I am a huge fan of autobio comics, the first ones I came across were Dennis Eichorn's Real Stuff and Slutburger by Mary Fleener. This led to Colin Upton's Big Thing and Harvey Pekar's American Splendor, which I have written about before. Over the years I have been impressed by Eddie Campbell's Alec books, Julie Doucet's Dirty Plotte and David B's Epileptic and more recently Ulli Lust's Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, and as I wrote on a recent post Susceptible by Geneviève Castrée. One thing that all these books have in common is a sense of a wider world outside the life of the protagonist. In Clumsy, Brown seems to live in a vacuum of his own life, we are told that the events take place in Michigan and Florida but there is no sense of what exists there. This speaks of homogenisation in the US but an author such as Castrée gives us a sense of the various locations she inhabits in her book. There is a difference between Quebec where she grows up and British Columbia where she visits her father “a mythical kingdom where dads go to disappear”. Brown's book is the story of an adolescent relationship in all it's intimate and dreary detail. Even a fan his work such as Paddy acknowledges the reviews that state that this book is "emotionally about six years old". I read Clumsy when it came out in 2002 and even then I was left with a feeling that I was too old for this book and also Brown's follow up Unlikely. They deal with such basic needy teenage emotions that I just thought "so what? Get over yourself". Although the blurbs on the back are full of praise by esteemed cartoonists James Kochalka and Chris Ware, who are I think are older than I am. As much as I like them, I often think Ware's books are emotionally stunted too, and he certainly positions himself in what I would term the whiny school of comics. I also have the same problem with Chris Thompson's Blankets, another tale of teenage romance told in way too much detail. Am I the only one that thinks Thompson needs an editor? As if to accentuate the immaturity of his work, Brown's later books reference Star Wars and Transformers, ferchrissakes, is it too much to ask to leave these childhood preoccupations behind? For the record I hate Star Wars too and its place in culture as a collective nostalgia and reference for childhood. In many ways I think these books are just the product of white male middle class privilege, how about taking your heads of out your posteriors and look around at the rest of the world. It is also worth examining the art style of Brown's book. In Clumsy, he leaves in spelling mistakes and crossed out word edits. Is this visible editing meant to lend an air of the authenticity? Is it just laziness? I am not against a naive drawing style, it is possible for art to look simplistic but be hiding more sophisticated skills, I'm thinking of Eddie Campbell or Julie Doucet here, but I think Brown's panels of night time scenes look more like they are taking place in the rain, which is poor visual communication. Part of my problem may be the format of the book. Clumsy is a 200 page perfect bound book and I think this elevates expectations. If it was published in a series of fanzines or minicomics ala Oily Comics, or other small press publishers, would I have had the same expectations? That's not to say I have low expectations of Oily, as I wrote here they are publishing excellent work. This post has been written on the hoof as Graphixia is hosting two panels this week on comics blogging as a small press analogue at University of the Arts, London and at Comics Forum in Leeds but in revisiting Clumsy it has only reinforced my dislike for the work and despite Paddy's protestations I am very unlikely (ahem) to read any other book by Jeffrey Brown.

#143 Why Openness is About Love, Not Hate

ernestop — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 15:17:48 +0000

Where I attempt to write about Hate, and find myself writing about something else.

“Honesty and openness is always the foundation of insightful dialogue.”

― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (1999)

[caption id="attachment_3305" align="alignleft" width="300"] "Sorry, you do not have access to this article."[/caption] Like Brenna, I wouldn't have chosen to write about things I hate. The term refers to a very strong, negative emotion we reserve for extraordinary, hopefully exceptional circumstances. Hate: there is already too much of it. As this is my first post for Graphixia, I will try to stick to the brief whilst hopefully managing to re-focus the post towards something positive. Not liking things is different to hating. There are many things I don't like. This means I wish these things were different. When I say "I wish they were different" it means that an a priori for that feeling is an intuition that something can be done about it. Many times we face situations we dislike that are not really the consequences of our conscious acts, or which we are (or feel that we are) not directly responsible for. There are problems whose roots are beyond our realm of immediate influence. In those cases it is easier to change our attitude or reaction to the circumstances we dislike, because there is really not much we can do to change those circumstances. There are other cases, however, in which things we dislike can actually, pragmatically, be changed. This means we can change them from something we dislike to something we actually feel comfortable with. This takes me to finally writing about things I dislike that I think I (we) can do something to change. These "things" are interconnected in my mind. What I dislike is lack of openness. For me openness is related to generosity, reciprocity, fairness. And these three terms are related to the concept of access. In this sense what I dislike is closeness, lack of response or feedback, self-centeredness and inequality. What do these things have to do with comics? Let me tell you a story, then. A personal one. I am only able to tell you this story, here, right now, because in my life I have been lucky and privileged enough to have access to a series of fortunate circumstances, one of which is an education. [No, we were not and have never been wealthy]. I was born in Mexico and I am a native Spanish speaker. When I was growing up, Mexico [this was the early 1980s] was not unlike countries from the former Eastern Block during the Cold War era. Or so it felt to many of us, who did not have access to many books, records and magazines that we somehow had an idea that existed but that we coudln't get hold of. When I was a kid one book shop in Mexico City where my parents religiously took me and my brother every Sunday stocked Asterix books. The albums were prominently displayed in one of the tables at the main entrance. [These were Spanish editions, translated, published and printed in Spain]. My father was not entirely sure Asterix was "good for us" (he mainly disliked the drawings... perhaps he saw himself in them, as his nose is not dissimilar to Uderzo's Caesar's nose). My mom however humoured us and eventually bought us [at great expense, often saving in secret for it] the whole collection, which I still treasure and re-read again and again and again. [caption id="attachment_3306" align="alignleft" width="187"] © 2013 LES ÉDITIONS ALBERT RENÉ[/caption] My dad, a civil engineer, got us to like American magazines (for years he was subscribed to Popular Mechanics, Discover and National Geographic, and I bizarrely have blurry memories of him bringing copies of Esquire from his work trips to Monterrey) and I liked to collect the computer adverts on those. It's there I guess where I first started reading in English. We also took English at school (about an hour every day) but it was reading magazines how I really got to practice it and expand my vocabulary. A bit later, as a teenager one of my favourite places to hang out (by myself) was the Bejamin Franklin Library in Mexico City. There I could read, for free, the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly, and basically devoured every fiction book they had, including some comics. Had I not had free access to this library, I wouldn't be writing this in English right now, and most surely my life would be very different from what it is now. For most of the years in which I was an undergraduate at the National University in Mexico (courses take longer back there) there was no Web, and most of us had access to resources in photocopy only. Everything was photocopied. As a student and as a tutor you could not assume everyone would be able to buy a given book, or that there would be enough copies in the libraries. Many tutors brought books from their trips abroad (no expenses claimed) and photocopied everything for their students. I remember bringing books back like one would smuggle banned goods. To date, my friends return home from their trips to the UK like culture trafficants, loaded with books, records and DVDs. I hope this brief anecdote illustrates a little bit why I care so much about open access to scholarly research. There are of course many other reasons why I think open access to scholarly resources online is important, but I cannot dwell in that here right now. (I have done that elsewhere). My (probably embarrassing) personal anecdote hopefully transmits the idea that I am now who I am because I had access to information. The information I had access to and the information I did not have access to defined me as a person. Of course I had to be interested in accessing that information in the first place, but had I faced a "computer says no" or "buy access here now", my life would have been completely different, in a completely negative kind of way. Comics studies or comics scholarship is an academic field or academic professional area that still makes most academics raise an eyebrow. If academic research in general is often perceived as incomprehensible Ivory Tower hyperspecialisation (not to say elitist snobbery), comics studies research is a niche within a niche. In the case of comics studies, however, the object of study is an art form/language/means of expression/cultural expression/whatever that belongs to popular culture. Non-academics love comics with a passion. It is in fact pathetic that something like that should be clarified, that the specialised appreciation (study) of comics is not exclusive of those in academia. Making research about comics available openly implies an act of generosity because it implies that authors and publishers are thinking of all types of readers, not only those lucky enough to be affiliated/have access to institutions or libraries that pay for access to that research (institutions pay so their members do not have to). When a piece of research is only available to institutions/consortia of institutions that pay a subscription, interested members of the public get the message they have to pay a hefty fee (or find a public library that subscribes to that resource; it is estimated that UK universities paid £150 million in journal subscriptions in 2010). This increases the friction between user's interest and accessing the research. It seems to me that we all could try harder to make academic research less difficult to access. This is where Open Access [PDF] comes in. For me personally writing is about communicating. Community, communion, communication: it is not only about being read, but about creating connections and enabling dialogue. At the moment the current state of academic publishing leaves me very unhappy because it does not look to me like it's trying harder to ensure the research academics get paid to publish by their institutions and/or funders (including the government in many cases) is openly available to those who are not academics, and perhaps more importantly to those who are not academics in the wealthiest institutions of the wealthiest countries. Perhaps "Joe Public" (supposing he exists) will not be interested in reading academic research on comics. But why would we prejudge that? Who are we to predetermine who is to be interested in what we do? [And especially when "Joe Public" has paid taxes that have helped some of that research be conducted and eventually published?] Openness to me is like an extended handshake. It is an offering. It means that even if the offering might be received with disinterest, or silence, or doubt, or suspicion, the offering remains. Openness allows a space for reciprocity, but it cannot guarantee it. It will sound hippie and naïve and maybe stupid to many, but openness is an expression of love. This does not mean it's all done for selflessness. Far from it. Openness means love for the work we do, because we want it to be accessible as widely as possible. It means, too, a form of love for our academic colleagues, whom we hope will be interested and will find it directly useful, and love for the unknown Other, non-academics and young people and parents and grandchildren and whatnot, regular people who might or might not be interested, but who will face an open invitation and not a closed door. My arguments for Open Access in academic publishing are not just touchy-feely, they are very pragmatic and stem from what I and others perceive to be the current situation in academia. The traditional system of academic publishing has encouraged a culture in which academics publish to get jobs, and in some cases this has led to a sad case in which a happy bunch of academics read other happy few academics but no one else does. Changing this culture is more complicated than changing access or distribution -business- models, as it implies a profound transformation of the public reception, understanding, valorisation and re-use of academic research outside academia itself. I really dislike that in the age of the World Wide Web, academic culture in general seems still very provincial, assuming everyone has the same level of privilege than everybody else, as if everybody could just grab a plane and spend a month living in London to do research at the British Library. (Sorry for italics excess, but hey, we were asked to rant...). Academics do not need to sell individual copies of the journals they publish articles in, and with a few exceptions the royalties from academic monographs are frankly negligible. Most academics don't really publish for money (i.e., academics don't make money depending on how many individual copies of their work they sale). Academics however publish because that's what they are supposed to do, and at the moment the only ones making money from the work academic publish are publishers. I dislike the fact authors have been practically alienated from the product of their labour by these commercial publishers, who get authors to accept licensing conditions that potentially and practically limit how authors can distribute their own work. At the moment it looks like academic reputation is de facto defined by who is excluded from it. Openness is meant to offer a template for inclusion. The pragmatic obstacles are financial, infrastructural and cultural. The challenges are huge, and most existing Open Access options are indeed not ideal and undergoing important transformations. Academics need jobs, and on the one hand we are told that public impact and all forms of impact matter, but at the same time we are constantly told to do things as if the Internet had never been invented. Working towards increasing fairer access to research is not about "destroying academia as we know it", on the contrary, it is about working to ensure academic research achieves its purpose of contributing to society in a fairer, less elitistic kind of way. The brief for this post was to write about hate, and I chose to write about openness as an expression of love. I may have failed at it --I know it is too long-- and you might have totally hated this post, but here it is, for free, for you, to read and reuse, and do whatever you wish with it. Think of it this way: at least you didn't have to pay for it. --- The views expressed on this post are those of the author and are not necessarily representative of his affiliated institutions, projects, committees, publishers or employers.

#144 Jeffrey Brown’s School for Whiny Children, or Why Whiny Comics are OK Sometimes

pjohnston — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 17:59:27 +0000

Damon Herd’s recent critique of Jeffrey Brown in these pages has made me feel strange. When Damon asked Jeffrey Brown (not to his face) to get over himself, I wondered perhaps if I needed to do the same. Is the connection I feel to Brown’s books one rooted in solipsism, and am I in fact a childish, self-indulgent fool?

Perhaps there is a part of my personality that is like that, and identifies with Jeffrey Brown on that simple level of sharing a desire to whine and think “woe is me,” But, as I said to Peter Wilkins at this year’s Comics Forum conference in Leeds, I think it’s OK to have a whine every once in a while, as long as you don’t do it frequently enough to become a whiny person. In the same way, I think it’s OK to enjoy whiny comics, as long as you read them as part of a balanced comics diet.

My love of Jeffrey Brown certainly comes down to personal circumstance, as he was responsible for getting me into comics seriously as an adult after a shameful period of ignoring them in my teens. I discovered his work when I was a whiny undergraduate, between relationships and obsessing over girls who didn’t want to go out with me, and I felt like his books (with titles like Every Girl is The End of the World For Me) were made for me. He was in the right place at the right time – I found his books full of warmth, humour and humanity, all of which were absent from the mainstream Marvel and DC comics I’d struggled to enjoy up until that point. I discovered a lot of the cartoonists I love today through Jeffrey Brown, and fell in love with the form all over again as a result of reading Clumsy. Rediscovering the art form of comics as an adult was a joy like no other, and Jeffrey Brown kickstarted this.

Damon was right to criticise the art of Jeffrey Brown’s Clumsy and to point out that it contains many examples of poor visual communication. I think it treads the line between bad communication and the raw honesty of leaving in the mistakes quite precariously. When I first read Clumsy I loved that the mistakes were left in and that some techniques were obviously underdeveloped because this made Brown seem endearingly fallible and human. Re-reading it recently I did find myself more critical of the art and less receptive to this emotional connection, but it was still there.

Most significantly, the underdeveloped nature of Jeffrey Brown’s art made me think that this was something I could do too. I’d read comics like Scary Go Round and wanted to make art like that, but I thought it would take years of training and significant effort and I recalled that I’d never had much luck with art pedagogy at the hands of some terrible schoolteachers, so I didn’t think I was likely to succeed. I’d also just started an MA in Creative Writing, so I was set on the path to becoming a writer. However, when I got really into comics again I thought I could make them because Jeffrey Brown had managed to do so with an attainably low level of skill. Now, I don’t subscribe fully to James Kochalka’s “Craft is the Enemy” ideal and I think it’s very important to become skilled and to hone your craft however you can, as well as learning the technical and material concerns of it in as much detail as possible. But Jeffrey Brown, with his emphasis on expression, gave me the starting point for all of this. He was the springboard. Were it not for Jeffrey Brown, I wouldn’t have put pen to paper and made the first comics I ever made, an appallingly drawn autobiographical webcomic called Low Fidelity, which thankfully no longer exists and which I have removed all traces of. I also then went on to write and draw a graphic novel for my MA thesis, which is available as a PDF on my website, but I’m really embarrassed by it now because I’ve developed my style in comics a lot more since then and am still learning and fine-tuning my craft, which I think still has some way to go but will eventually develop to a level I’m happy with.

I’ve come a long way with my style and so has Jeffrey Brown throughout his career. As I wrote in my previous blog post, his latest autobiographical book A Matter of Life is drawn in a fine, well-executed style, in full colour, and is certified whine-free. I would suggest that if Damon were to give Brown one more try, that this book might be the one to read, though Funny Misshapen Body deals with the thorny issue of comics in art school with an elegant critique so that might also be of interest. Let’s not talk about Star Wars.

I realise I’ve made this post more of a blog about my own sentimental attachment to Jeffrey Brown than a true riposte, but I think this goes some way to explaining our differences of opinion, as well as the popularity of the “whiny school,” most notably Chris Ware. Jeffrey Brown’s rawness, mistakes and lack of polish are easy to connect with because we all make mistakes. In reading books like Clumsy and Unlikely we can come to terms with this and place our own lives in perspective. While there was necessary bite in Douglas Wolk’s comment that Chris Ware’s works have “an emotional range of one note,” (in his book Reading Comics) you can find a huge emotional range in whiny comics if you read them closely, particularly Ware’s comics, which showcase just about every emotion under the sun and are highly nuanced and complex if you can look past the whining.

Whining in comics can be a drag, sure – but sometimes you need to have a whine and to get self-indulgent, and Jeffrey Brown offers comics that can help with this. I see them as like Ben & Jerry’s – to be consumed as a treat every once in a while, and only as part of a balanced diet. Having said that, I do eat a lot of ice cream.

Works Cited:

Brown, Jeffrey A Matter Of Life. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions, 2013.

… Clumsy. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions, 2002.

… Funny Misshapen Body. New York: Touchstone, 2009.

… Every Girl is the End of the World For Me. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions, 2006.

… Unlikely. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions, 2003.

Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2007.

#145 Collaboration: Love not Work?

wilkinsp — Wed, 11 Dec 2013 04:45:37 +0000

This post on collaboration is guided entirely by serendipity. It came together out of the books and blog posts I was reading, tweets I’d seen, and podcasts I’d listened to. I went from a state of “what do I have to say about collaboration?” to having a surfeit of material that I’m not sure coheres into a single point. What I’m concerned about here is the relationship between the “labour of love” that collaborators share and wage labour, whether all “work” that one does with others necessarily gets co-opted by an exploitative capitalist system. What are the ethics of working together? The provocation for these questions comes from reading about the “Comix Factory”: various sociological analyses of comics as cultural work, coming on the heels of a panel presentations at Comics Forum 2013 in Leeds and at the University of the Arts, London, in which I and other members of the Graphixia team extolled the virtues of DIY collaboration as an antidote to conventional academic publishing, particularly on the subject of comics criticism, which, I argued, had the obligation to question and disrupt academic practices in the arts because it was a new discipline. Roger Sabin, one of our hosts at UAL, one of the finest critics of comics in the world, and author of a book on punk rock, asked if we wanted to destroy academia as it was currently structured. Instead of saying “yes,” I admitted that there was a lot of having our cake and eating it too in our arguments. On returning home from the UK, I read Casey Brienza’s recent post in Comics Forum, the blog that runs in conjunction with the conference we had just attended. Brienza discusses sociologist Howard Becker on collaborative labour being essential to artistic production. She writes:

Comic art is no exception to Becker’s basic insight. Writers, illustrators, graphic designers, letterers, editors, printers, typesetters, publicists, publishers, distributors, retailers, and countless others are both directly and indirectly involved in the creative production of what is commonly thought of as the comic book.

The comic book is a product of cultural “work,” a somewhat factory-like distribution of labour. Indeed, Brienza compares it, albeit loosely, to the production of an iPhone. Brienza argues that comics scholarship is too dominated by literary critics who tend to celebrate an “auteur” theory of comics production. A sociological approach, she suggests, would emphasize instead the network of people necessary to produce a comic and interrogate whether or not the process was exploitative, and, if so, how. I think that what Brienza has to say is true but somehow disheartening. We are used to thinking of DC and Marvel in these terms, but I suppose they also apply to Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly: as long as people are selling comics art to make money, even if it’s not enough money, they are entering into the network or labour and in so doing they exit the world of art as pleasure. Aesthetics gives way to economics. At Comics Forum 2013, I had the pleasure of interviewing Paul Gravett about his new book Comics Art and attending a launch event for the book at Travelling Man in Leeds. The cover of Comics Art features a page from the Dutch artist, Joost Swarte. It depicts a scene from a “Comix Factory” as the letters on the window show. It features over 10 people (nearly all men!) working away at different elements of the process of producing a comic. Three different versions of Swarte’s character Jopo de Pojo sit around waiting. One is having his hair styled. A photographer talks to a man in a three-piece suit who looks like a big shot. Painters work on backgrounds, narrative boxes and speech bubbles. A couple appears to be making out in the WC. Swarte appears to be both acknowledging and mocking Brienza’s notion of comics as cultural work at the same time. But the scene is not realistic. Comics are not put together on big boards on scaffolds with live actors and then photographed. The multiple laborers involved in producing Swarte’s comics are not the ones pictured in the image. The people in Brienza’s list remain hidden. As Gravett notes, this scene is more like a movie set, from whence we get both our “auteur” term and the most illuminating example of the network of labour producing art, names assembled in the end credits, streaming by so quickly that we cannot read them, the workers the auteur assembles to accomplish his or her vision. One wishes to ask Swarte, why show these fantasy constructs and not the real people who work to produce your comics? Perhaps the answer lies with the writer, or auteur, who toils away in the bottom left corner of the picture, decentred, looking desperate to get something together before the girder suspended over his head labelled “deadline” drops on him. Maybe the labour going on around him represents a wish fulfillment fantasy: if only so many people were sharing the labour of putting this thing together. But the writer on this page shows less a sense of cool mastery than one of anxiety and responsibility. The others are not working with him but for whoever is footing the bill. So we see here the double-sided sword of the creative process: the desire for someone to share the work coupled with the fear of a factory-like work setting. For someone like Swarte, the sociological, economic model of comics production is a kind of nightmare, a system gone wrong. When I think about what Brienza is talking about, I feel a bit nightmarish myself. At Graphixia, we see ourselves as working on the margins of the system of labour. We are all academics working and/or studying within institutions, and yet our collaboration on the blog seems only tangentially tied to that work. It helps us apply for funding and get a certain kind of recognition, but it is “off the side of our desks” as people say about work they do in their spare time. Surely, we could not be co-opted into an exploitative system? But then I read a tweet from Ben Woo, whom I follow on twitter and who is the second up in the writers on comics and sociology for Comics Forum. Woo was at at a workshop on youth cultures in Belgium, tweeting a presentation from Miranda Campbell: Suddenly it ocurred to me that at Graphixia we might not be dismantling academia at all. Rather, we could simply be reinforcing what we feel we are struggling against. What if we are just supplying a kind of unpaid labour to the academic system? Fortunately, I listened to an episode of the Inkstuds podcast that reminded me that there was more to the social than the economics of labour. This episode featured Joann Sfar, author of The Rabbi’s Cat and erstwhile member of the French L’association group (whose history shows some of the perils of collaborative work in the market place). Sfar had the most wonderful things to say about collaboration, that working with someone else is just plain fun: you get drunk together and draw and write together. He also said that when he was writing material for his friend Lewis Trondheim to draw, he wrote to make him happy–not to fit his artistic sensibilities but to make him happy as a person. Trondheim likes to draw fights and beautiful women, so Sfar obliges him. This struck me as the most ethical and aesthetic approach to collaboration possible: give pleasure, make someone else happy. This is what I strive for with my fellow Graphixians, and it’s what I see artists striving for when they contribute to Comics Workbook, Team Weird Comics, or just draw back and forth to each other. Sure they would like to make money for their work and thus enter into the world of labour and capital, but in the absence of that they create work for each other out of love. Goodness knows collaboration and DIY publishing isn’t easy. People who work together often fall out. People who once strove to make each other happy end up hating each other or working together begrudgingly. Look at John Lennon and Paul McCartney, for instance, and consider all the bands who started out having fun and ended up not speaking to each other often because of the impact of labour and market forces upon them. Still, for a brief moment, the magic of working to make someone else happy eclipses all else. So, just as we should heed Brienza’s call for a sociological analysis of the production of comics, we should also consider an analysis of the pleasures of working with others out of love. For this too is a neglected realm of comics scholarship.

#146 Comics and The Culture of Collaboration as Public Good

admin — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 06:12:19 +0000

When we encounter discussions of collaboration, there is a natural tendency to gravitate toward a conversation about practice and the process behind comic book production. However, we should be wary of such practice-centred approaches because comics, as they often do, occupy a problematic space when it comes to representing a collaborative endeavour. Indeed, comics are so intertwined in the various machinations of our cultural expression and the collusion–not collaboration–that governs that expression, they offer up a different way of thinking about the nature and representation of collaboration. Recently, the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination has been a topic of reflection. Along with that reflection was the auctioning of Curt Swan’s original artwork for Action Comics #308 and DC’s purchase, and subsequent donation to the Kennedy Library, of Al Plastino’s original artwork for Superman #180. Both these events are full of the usual meanderings and musings about the value of original artwork, missing issues and so on – you can look up the backstory yourself. What’s interesting for our purposes here is the way both of these issues suggest a different type of collaboration or, more precisely, collaboration as cultural collusion for the public good. In Action Comics #308, President Kennedy stands in for Clark Kent to protect Superman’s secret identity. What’s made evident by this story, if it wasn’t evident already, is the collusion between Westernized cultural enterprizes that value secrecy over transparency. It’s a timely commentary that we now read Superman’s declaration at the end of the comic as rich in irony. Point is, comics, perhaps more than any other medium, are directly implicated in furthering a cultural hegemony. In effect, The President of the United States of Freedom is collaborating with Superman to keep a secret from all of us so we can go on oblivious to the machinations that revolve around us. Lest there be declarations of conspiracy theories, Superman #180–drawn by Al Plastino–represents a more positive collaboration between systems of power and comics. In this issue, Superman is enlisted to help further Kennedy’s fitness program. He does so willingly of course, and it would seem the cause is just. Problem is that even this collaboration marks the kind of philosophical collusion that demonizes the new in favour of resuscitating and entrenching a conservative agenda that again reflects the dominant cultural hegemony. In other words, while all this is painted as a collaboration to make good things happen, on a deeper level it represents a kind of collusion designed to devalue the innovations Superman supersedes and represents. He comes to his great fitness by happenstance of birth and the luck of getting off a dying planet, not through hard work--he's part of the problem!!. Then there’s the little pun that shows Superman’s complicit involvement in the politics of closing the “missile” gap, but moving on. Collaboration in the way it is represented here is both on the page and in the making. Superman is sent to physically dictate a cultural shift toward physical fitness–its collaborative propaganda. Which brings me to the above–the collaborative approval statement. Superman #180 borrows the language of the Comics Code Authority for its splash page. The Presidential seal replaces the Comics Code Authority seal, but the sentiment, one that represents a supposedly rigorous collaboratory approval process, is the same. There’s lots of literature about the Comics Code, but the important point here is that the Code–and the seal that represents it–is a signal of collaboration. It suggests a singular mindset that will protect us, like Superman, from all the horrors that cultural expression has to offer. After all, the code is a collaborative endeavour by the major comics publishers to push back against the cultural hegemony that would wish to censor them and their content. It’s a tactic developed in Hollywood a transposed to comics. But again, it’s comics collaboration as collusion. If the above all seems real obvious, it is: we’re used to seeing things overtly now. Porn is everywhere; it’s not illicit anymore–as Anthony Bourdain has eloquently demonstrated, even the Food Network is just porn with food–comics regularly push the boundaries of taste (and good for them!), and our cultural production is dominated by the vacuous but riveting discourse of The Kardashians and their clones. All of these commentaries reflect a collaborative enterprize between our evolving culture and industries that seek to represent it so that it is palatable.That said, our cultural production has never been more openly collaborative. Facebook represents a collective archival and ongoing cultural discourse unlike anything the world has yet seen (Like Us!). All this to say that it’s important not to get too focused on the role collaboration plays in the production and practice of comics. If collaboration means to work with someone to make something, then there are plenty of open spaces where we can think about how collaboration manifests itself. With comics, the intersection of cooperation (Avengers, Justice League, Fantastic Four), collaboration (drafting, drawing, painting, inking, writing, renewing, reinventing) and collusion (Comics Code, political agendas, propaganda) is a busy one often causing collisions that drive our representation of contemporary culture.

#147 The Graphixia Holiday Round-Up

Grayb — Tue, 24 Dec 2013 17:00:18 +0000

Ho ho ho! Merry Happy!* Here at Graphixia, we've been thinking about the end of the year and reflecting on what has been in comics, both personally and in the industry. This post collects some of our thoughts on the year that was 2013. Best Comic Published in 2013:

Peter: Marble Season by Gilbert Hernandez (Fantagraphics). Gilbert comes up with an amazing coming-of age comic to put himself back in contention for best Hernanzez brother. As if it were a contest. (Honourable mention to Bandette by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover [Monkey Brain] and Violenzia by Richard Sala [Fantagraphics].) Dave: Hawkeye #11 - The Pizza Dog Issue. The most innovative comic in a long time from one of the best storylines in comics today by the best creative team (Fraction / Aja / Hollingsworth) since Watchmen. Brenna: Letter 44 by Alberto Alburquerque and Charles Soule. A late entry for 2013 but I am already so gripped by this new series from Oni. I love the concept, I love the dialogue, I love the old-school-style art. Fab. Hattie: Miriam Katin's Letting it Go. Honestly, this was joint favourite with Susceptible by Genevieve Castree as mentioned by Damon, but since he's nabbed that one I'll go with Katin's moving account of her struggles to reconcile herself to the idea of her adult son moving to Berlin. I adored this book and have reread it several times over recent months. The art is beautiful and I found myself profoundly moved by Katin's memories and exploration of her physical and emotional reactions to events. Damon: Susceptible by Geneviève Castrée. A beautiful and delicately drawn book by the artist/musician Castrée. I've waited a while for a longer work by her and I wasn't disappointed, I was seduced. Scott: Sandman: Overture #1 by Neil Gaiman. I know this is a very recent arrival, but I'd been anticipating it for some time and it lived up to the hype. This is Gaiman's long awaited return to his epic Sandman series, and it's a prequel to the 75 issue storyline that won so many awards and became the academy's darling for what comics "could be" if they were approached with seriousness and depth. It's a bi-monthly series (already delayed for issue number two), so they're taking their time with both the plot and the art. Gaiman's not out to completely reinvent the wheel - his series was successful for a reason - but he's adding layers to his previous stories by providing characterization that makes me want to reread the full Sandman series again. The first issue was astounding (even including a fold out double centerfold!), and I highly recommend it to anyone who was a fan of the series the first go around. Gaiman has not only lost none of his touch, he's a smarter and more creative writer than he was two decades ago. Best Read of 2013:

Peter: Mind MGMT by Matt Kindt (Dark Horse). Perhaps the most stunningly drawn and coloured comic I have ever seen. Kindt puts everyone else to shame with his one-man show. Honourable mention to Grandville by Bryan Talbot. Dave: Parker series by Darwyn Cooke and Jeff Lemire's Essex County collection. Both represent great examples of great stories meeting great art. I liked the drawing and the tone of that drawing as much as the story lines. Brenna: Fluffy by Simone Lea. I love that I learned about her at Comics Forum last year. I maintain that Fluffy is basically the perfect comic. Hattie: Michel Rabagliati's Paul au Parc. I know that I do spend a lot of my time rambling on about Rabagliati's work but he is honestly just superb. This, his most recent book, tells the story of how Paul begins to overcome his natural shyness and joins the Scouts. What follows is a touching story about life, friendship and growing up. Paul A Quebec was undoubtedly Rabagliati's finest work but this comes a close second in my mind. Damon: Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life by Ulli Lust. I'm beginning to shy away from all these breezeblock sized books that keep coming out, I like the emphemeral nature imbedded in floppies and mini comics, but Lust's book drew me in to her world. Or at least her punky teenage years hitchiking from Austria to Sicily. Expressive two colour drawings and translated by the late Kim Thompson. Scott: X-Men: Battle of the Atom by Brian Michael Bendis. This one isn't really fair as it's a full 10 issue arc, though I'm sure it will be collected in a trade soon (if it hasn't been already) so I don't feel like I'm really cheating. I'm showing my superhero colours here again, but the fallout from Avengers vs. x-men in 2012 has created quite a shift in where the reader's sympathies lie in terms of the racial equality that the x-men were founded on. Scott Summers is now the leader of a splinter x-men group that is far more subversive in its methods, with Wolverine now a teacher and running the Jean Grey school for the "gifted." (i.e., mutants). The innovative reversal aside, the writing is fabulous and the art, by various, is always superlative. The Battle of the Atom crossover (bookended by two one shots) focuses on the original, 1963-version, x-men traveling to their future / our present ostensibly to comment on what has gone wrong with Xavier's idealistic vision for a cooperative humankind. Their presence and commentary collapses the history of the series and shows us not just how the x-men have changed, but how the larger cultural milieu that the x-men was/is written for has changed as well. As a metatext, it's mind-boggling nuanced and thought provoking. Most Disappointing Read of 2013: Peter: Mind the Gap by Jim McCann and Rodin Esquejo (Image). Just not to my taste: glossy art, sensational storytelling--everything I don't like about commercial comics. Dave: Building Stories by Chris Ware. All form no substance. While I admire Ware, he's getting a bit reliant on the same schtick. I'd like to see some real innovation past Billy [Jimmy? -Ed.] Corrigan, but everything seems to be a re-hash. Brenna: Paying For It by Chester Brown. Ugh, I like Chester Brown and I align with him on this issue policitally but then he is just such a misogynist, myopic sleeze that I can't even. Hattie: Saltire. I had high hopes for this first outing for this 'First National Superhero' for Scotland. Unfortunately I was really rather disappointed by the character and the story lines. Scottish comics could have done better in this instance. Damon: Marvelman/Miracleman. A friend gave me a bunch of old comics including a complete run of Warrior magazine and I realised that, despite the legendary status of the Marvelman strip, superhero stories bore me to tears. Scott: Dexter by Jeff Lindsay. Having followed the TV series and having read all seven books that spawned it, when I heard that the original novel series' author was going to be writing the comics version of Dexter I nearly had a fanboy fit. The series was pushed back half a year from its original release date, building up even more anticipation, but when it came out I couldn't have been more disappointed. The plot was too easy and contrived, the art was lackluster and rushed, and there were even spelling errors in some of the dialogue. I still bought all five issues of the miniseries, but I was bored to tears by the predictability of the plot and the droning nature of the text. And they just announced a sequel miniseries! Booooo. Most Important Comics Headline of 2013: Peter: The death of Kim Thompson at Fantagraphics. Successful Kickstarter campaign for their spring season suggests that Fantagraphics will carry on. Dave: Is Hawkeye’s Pizza Dog issue the future of superhero comics? Finally someone who sees the convergence of great writing, colouring, drawing with interesting storylines happening in a Superhero comic. The everyday. Brenna: Archie Comics publishes first gay kiss. [Underrepresentation of LGBT in mainstream comics generally.] THREE YEARS after introducing the character and ONE YEAR after the gay wedding issue they finally get around to it. God love 'em. Hattie: I'm struggling to think of something a fellow Graphixian hasn't already mentioned (and I probably can't choose Damon and I joining Graphixia**) so I am going to 'cheat' slightly here... I'm choosing one of my most important comics studies headlines of this year and I think it is the Comics Grid becoming a journal. If you have followed our recent posts about our trips to Leeds and London you'll have heard us talk a lot about how important the Comics Grid has been to us all personally and in terms of our academic approach. This development in the Grid's status this year gets me pretty darn excited about the potential and future of comics scholarship. Damon: Kim Thompson RIP. Publisher, editor and long-time champion and translator of European and non English language comics. Thank you for Ulli Lust, Jacques Tardi and Jason among many others. Scott: The biggies (of the serious stuff) I think have been covered above, so I'm going to go peripherally related here and say that, for the comic shop community at least, the announcement of Ben Affleck as the new Batman took the prize. Total mixed feelings on that one, but then hey, I thought Ledger was going to make a terrible Joker. Biggest WTF Comics Moment of 2013: Peter: Shia LaBoeuf's plagiarism of Daniel Clowes' Justin M Damiano for his short film HowardCantour.com. And his plagiarism of everyone else, including Dan Nadel at Picture Box. Dave: Visiting the Art Spiegelman CO-MIX: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics and Scraps exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery / Everyone's undying love of Linda Barry. Underwhelming hodge-podge of stuff. Something makes me nervous about putting comics in an art gallery. Self-gratifying, self-selected, and self-promoting. A little too dirty for me. Brenna: Definitely Damon sending me the Scott Pilgrim / Sarah Palin crossover comic, which I will talk about in more detail over at Book Riot soon. Could not be a weirder use of letters and ink. Hattie: Shia LaBoeuf vs Daniel Clowes. I have probably done my WTF face at other comics events this year but this is one where I don't even know where to begin. Damon: Setting up the Sequential Investigations: The New Comics exhibition at Graphixia's Comics & the Multimodal World conference and being stopped by security. They were disturbed by Warren Craghead's 'seed toss' post-it artworks, which occasionally depicted guns and knives. I think they were worried about a student going postal or thought it was a cry for help. Scott: The Shia LaBoeuf thing, though it's been said twice above. Comics don't really make news anymore, sadly. This was disappointing though, from a collector's dream perspective: A man who was remodeling a house he'd bought for $10K found a copy of Action Comics #1 used as insulation in the wall. There was some kind of kefuffle and in the heat of the moment his aunt TORE OFF THE WHOLE BACK COVER. Enough to reduce a nerd to tears, since there are only supposedly something like 100 copies left in existence. Definitely WTF. Most Significant Personal Comics Moment of 2013: Peter: Interviewing Paul Gravett at Comics Forum 2013 in Leeds. He signed my copy of Comics Art "from one comics activist to another." Dave: Reading Hawkeye #11. Just such a great comic and such a great story run. Brenna: The Spiegleman exhibit at VAG. Not that I liked everything about it, but it gave me the most to ponder in my understanding of comics and the academy / canon (and why I'm starting to agree with Dave that we don't need no stinkin' canon). Hattie: Meeting Michel Rabagliati. Earlier this year I was lucky enought to interview Michel Rabagliati for my PhD. He was every bit as kind, gentle and interesting as you would expect and was very generous with his time, thoughts and Paul merchandise. Damon: Being tweeted that 'the man at the crossroads' Paul Gravett was talking about my comic at the Graphic Medicine conference in Brighton in August. During a DeeCAP performance at a conference in Dundee I performed a strip from The Adventures of Ticking Boy and later gave PG a copy of the comic. He then included it in a rundown of 'graphic medicine' comics while presenting in Brighton. Scott: I got to meet Stan Lee, up close and personal, at Fan Expo in Vancouver this Summer. At 90 years old, he seemed remarkably robust - cracking quick-witted jokes, hitting on girls in his audience and posing for a huge group shot with over 100 cosplayers. 'Nuff said. I also got to sit in and have my picture taken in the DeLorean from Back to the Future. I know that's not comic booky, but I wanted to make sure that fact is out there. Yes, that DeLorean. Yes, me. Most Anticipated Comic of 2014: Peter: More Bad Machinery from John Allison. Sophie and I can't get enough of this awesome comic. Dave: Jason Lutes' Berlin: City of Lights. I'm dying to see this tome wrapped up before I die. It's been a long time for Lutes since City of Smoke / Stones and I'm wanting some more! Brenna: BRYAN LEE O'MALLEY IS DROPPING SECONDS IN THE SUMMER. OMG CAN'T WAIT. I heart you, Bryan Lee O'Malley. Hattie: I haven't got a clue… BUT I did put Joe Sacco's The Great War on my Christmas list and so I would say that it is my most anticipated comics reading of 2014 (at the moment!). Damon: No idea! Surprise me. Keeping my eye on self-publishers & small press though. Oily, Retrofit, kuš! and the work of Sam Alden & Warren Craghead, Robert Kirby's QU33R anthology looks interesting too. Scott: I really haven't been following the announcements like I should for the big summer events. That said, I'm really looking forward to the final issue of Robert Kirkman's All Out War 12 issue arc in the Walking Dead, and I'm biting my nails waiting to see what Gaiman's going to be offering next in Sandman: Overture. Man, am I glad he's back on that stuff. I'm with Dave too on the third volume of Berlin (which I had no idea was coming out until he mentioned it above), as I just finished City of Smoke and it was just as amazing as City of Stones, if not moreso. -- * This is a Community reference. I watch a lot of Community. ** Sure you can. - Ed.

#148 Morrison and Quitely and Perfect Partnerships

Grayb — Tue, 31 Dec 2013 17:00:14 +0000

Our theme of collaboration this round got me thinking about collaborative partnerships in comics, which immediately took me to my favourite pairing: Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. Morrison and Quitely are both skilled in their own rights as writer and artist, respectively; they each collaborate with many other comics folk and do good work in other venues. But something about their work sparkles when they work together, and I would argue the best of each man's career has been under the Morrison-Quitely banner. Whether their original, complex, and harrowing character work in We3 or their fresh take on old superhero standbys in JLA: Earth 2 and All-Star Superman, the work they've done together has consistently challenged and surprised audiences. In the world of comics, quite simply, I think of them as a Perfect Partnership.

As Marc Singer pointed out in his Grant Morrison, the relationship between Morrison and Quitely is different from with any of his collaborators; where other artists do not communicate directly with Morrison but instead are routed through the series editor or his wife, Quitely and Morrison frequently work together in their hometown of Glasgow. The difference in their relationship seems to lend a closeness has allowed for some of the most experimental work in each of their careers, particularly the stunning We3, which forwarded a style Morrison called "Western Manga" and attempted to represent three-dimensional action on the pages of a comic in a new and more dynamic way. Morrison's work with Quitely differs from his more carefully framed and professionally distant collaborative relationships, to, in that in Morrison-Quitely pairings, the visual is allowed to supersede the script and take centre stage. Morrison's other titles tend to be story-heavy and pay-off-light, as Sean Rogers argues to good (and sometimes overdone) effect in his Comics Journal review of another collaborative effort, Flex Mentallo:

Surely the strongest sequences in the Morrison/Quitely canon are those where Morrison writes the least: the potted origin story that leads off their Superman, the silent psychodrama that takes up an entire issue of New X-Men, the video screens and savage attacks of We3.

I disagree with Rogers about the vapidity of Morrison's writing, but I do agree that Morrison-Quitely comics are most alive in the most highly visual sequences, and more importantly that Morrison's work is more alive when it is Quitely who realizes his scripts. Part of this is as simple as Quitely's brilliance. As Morrison said at Glasgow Comic Con:

We worked all this stuff out for the deep symbol structure of it and built this up and I’m really excited by this, it's all grids, it's like a mathematical puzzle and time is represented in many different ways, so it's really kinda exciting. And again, it's something only the two of us could have done together, no one else would be able to do this stuff that I've asked Frank to do.

But it's also worth knowing that We3, certainly the finest work the pair have ever done, is also the work the two have done most free from the constraints of the Big 2 and their intellectual property. And perhaps that's where collaboration works best: closeness, comparable strengths, and the creative freedom to explore new pathways. All I know is, I'll read anything they make.

#149 The Multimodality of Comics in Everyday Life

admin — Thu, 09 Jan 2014 19:34:08 +0000

The Graphixia crew is over at The New Everyday this week participating in a cluster about comics and the everyday. Here's the intro to the cluster, curated by Ernesto Priego and me, David N. Wright. We are pleased to be able to contribute to The New Everyday by curating this cluster collecting short articles that focus on how comics infiltrate cultural representations or situations that fall outside extensions of the page. While comic books have certainly transgressed the page by moving onto digital platforms and other forms of communication media, they have also embedded themselves in our sense of history, the design of our digital interfaces, academic conversations, urban spaces, cultural discourses, and representations of personal hygiene. Nevertheless, current comics scholarship seems adamant to take paradigms of print for granted, leaving other manifestations of comics iconography and “language” largely unexplored. We’re moving comics off the page, both by publishing a digital collection and by addressing the extensions of comics that do not necessarily link back to Gutenberg’s machine. As an international, multidisciplinary, collaborative online project, featuring a diverse range of scholarly timbre, this cluster is an experiment in online comics scholarship that offers a different kind of output than what might normally be expected from journal articles. If comics are to move off the page, then this cluster actively resists such associations as it strives for a kind of liminal, fragmentary scholarship that suggests offerings in search of responses. Architecture, design, sex, web browsers, current politics, celebrity magazines, fandom, cities and advertising: the articles in this cluster explore just a few examples of comics not as a fixed paradigm, but as multimodality itself. The articles here are not definitive answers to a set of questions; they are the beginnings of a conversation, reflections occurring in a newly framed space, and instigations for open resistance, dissent, optimism, and exchange. From the outset, we undertook the creation of this cluster as a rapid online publication project, and as such we did not impose editorial guidelines apart from requesting brief contributions that addressed its thematic scope. "Rapid", however, is relative: the seed was planted during the Comics and the Multimodal World conference in Vancouver in June 2013, and work for this cluster started in early September 2013. Moreover, writing and editing for different online content management systems is a skill set on its own that requires and imposes its own working behavior and timeframe, which usually account for very long working hours during extended periods. On the one hand there tends to be a bombastic rhetoric of the 'simple', 'immediate' and 'intuitive' nature of online technologies; on the other hand the are the negative, snobbish academic prejudices against blogging and other forms of online publishing as legitimate, citeable academic outputs. In reality, digital labour remains intensive, complex and specialised, requiring not only appropriate expertise but also heaps of patience, willingness to collaborate and understanding of the technical idiosyncracies of specific platforms. Authors composed their contributions for the MediaCommons platform, and therefore worked directly on its content management system, facing different challenges that up to a certain extent also determined what kind of contribution was and was not possible. To this end, the cluster reflects the limitations of taking comics off the page at the same time as it seeks to position the critical dialogue about comics outside prescribed, or established, limitations. Ultimately, the cluster hopes to help position comics and the scholarship about comics within a 21st century academic dialogue, pushing the subject toward new situations, contexts, and definitions. If nothing else, we wanted a digital cluster about comics to instigate conversations and arguments about not only the practice of comics scholarship, but the representative spaces in which those conversations and arguments might take place. Like other clusters within MediaCommons, this cluster is meant to reflect digital scholarship in practice, or scholarship created with digital means meant to be read and cited with digital means. This cluster about the multimodality of comics in everyday life is in itself an expression of the everyday constraints and opportunities posed by academic worklife in the 21st century. Rock on you crazy diamonds, Ernesto Priego David N. Wright

#150 Asserting Authorial Authority: How Collaborative are Comics Really?

smarsden — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 05:27:26 +0000

Comics are, on the surface, the most consistently collaborative form of literature – it hardly needs to be said that comics are most frequently the result of a production team that includes the writer, the artist, the colourist and the letterer, among others. In effect, though we’re presented with a singular work, much as occurs in film we are blinded to the fact that we are actually seeing multiple artists practicing their chosen crafts, each attempting to emphasize his or her own particular talent. We tend to emphasize this collaborative aspects of comics, often simply out of habit or fear of privileging the writer – after all, it’s more difficult to quote a picture in order to show how an artist, colourist or letterer has reinterpreted the original vision in order to come up with something radically different from the unique ambitions of the text, and doing so arguably requires more subjective interpretation. The bulk of the literature notes, almost dismissively, that comics are collaborative and offers very little in terms of exploring any hierarchy that might exist, primarily to tacitly declare that comics are, in a word, different from other print media. In the actual scripts for comics, however, writers often assert their textual authority in order to limit the ambiguities that the others involved in the work can take advantage of – Alan Moore is notorious for this, writing essentially in stream of consciousness, describing nearly every detail of even the smallest panel in order to ensure that his vision reaches the page. This said, there is no set formula as to how an author must interact with the team producing the comic, despite suggested templates for script writing from the major publishers (want to submit a comics script to Image, for example? It’s easier than you might think). An interesting comparison of scripts from different mainstream comics writers has been coming together at the comic book scripts archive (http://www.comicbookscriptarchive.com/archive/the-scripts/), where we can understand the interplay – or perhaps struggle - between writer, artist and letterer in a more nuanced way. The interaction, starting with the writer as the locus and then extending outward to the other players, is far more intricate than it at first appears. Neil Gaiman is a strong case in point here (and I admit that I may be concentrating on him a lot lately because of the superb start to his new Sandman: Overture series and the fact that it seems like a Sandman movie series is finally in the works). Looking at the posted script for Sandman #24, we see a similar stream of consciousness writing style as Moore employs, however there appears to be a trust and freedom given to those who he is working with to produce the issue. Referring to his artists by name, the script reads more like a conversation between peers, with open avenues for suggestion and a reliance on the skills of others to fill in areas where Gaiman knows that his artists have greater expertise than himself in creating innovative images. This said, because the Sandman is couched in mythology, he also provides sketches for the artists to follow to ensure that his vision is being followed accurately. This is, after all, Gaiman’s story, and as the script progresses we see the lengths that he goes to in order to tighten control over his subjects despite his friendly and open demeanor in his descriptions of the scenes. Gaiman directly addresses all those he knows will be involved in the production of the text from the outset, from the primary artist to the letterer, and he gives directions for each as he presents his vision of the issue. Throughout the script he describes in perfect detail how he would like word balloons to appear, how ornately costuming is meant to be drawn, which research material and from what period the artist should consult in order to accurately depict particular characters as he has written them – even those secondary characters who will only appear for a few panels at a time. It is the writer’s task to know the qualities of the artists who will be working for him (and, as the scripts show, this is indeed the dynamic) and while playing to them at times it also becomes necessary to restrain or subvert them. Quite telling is the final panel of Sandman #24, in which Gaiman provides highly detailed instructions for the small frame to his artist Kelly Jones: “Okay. Now close in on this mister cool Sandman. Kelley. Don't define his face with shadows on this final page define it with fine lines, as fine and sparse as you can. He's cool as Hell, and almost-smiling, totally mirthlessly.” Jones, known for his use of blacks and dark shadowing, is interrupted here at Gaiman’s behest – Gaiman is aware of Jones’ style and openly contrasts this with a description of the technique that Jones is meant to use. Comparing this panel from one of the others from the same issue, in which Jones employs the shadowing he is more known for, we see this: The comparison is striking, and it makes one realize how much creative control the writer actually wields over the display of the story. From panel arrangement, to shadowing, to particular technique in terms of shading or lettering, all aspects of the image are scrupulously described. Moreover, when presented with large splash panels and pages that contain little to no dialogue, we often think that because of the absence of text, the author has less to do with these interludes. When looking at the actual scripts, however, we can see that quite frequently the opposite is true: there is often what appears to be a nervousness that comes out in the form of lengthy description that the artist is required to follow, more detailed and embellished than for the frames in which text is directed to appear. Whether this is predicated on an anxiety related to control or simply a desire to ensure that the story as the writer sees it is portrayed accurately is debatable; however, it becomes clear that the writer controls far more of the process than he or she is often given credit for in works that are more frequently deemed collaborative. There is of course variation between writers in the amount of control that they assert over their comics, ranging from Miller, who draws most of his own scripts, to an author like Jason Aaron, who allows far more creative control. What is interesting however is that those comics that have been picked up by the academy are primarily those that are more writer-centric, in which the scripts are so detailed as to allow little room for maneuvering on the part of the rest of the ensemble cast; again Gaiman, Moore and Ellis among others being at the centre of the current canon. I don’t mean to assert that the artist’s (or letterer, or colourist) task is any less significant when it comes to producing a comic, and the overall product we read is clearly a combination of multiple talents – there remain annual awards to acknowledge the contributions of best penciller, inker and letterer to attest to their skills. It is, however, important that we note that the comics process is far less collaborative than it at first appears, and perhaps it is our desire as society as a whole to pursue equality on all fronts that causes us to gloss the creative hegemony that is often enforced by the writer.

#151 - Stop, Collaborate and Nelson

hattiek — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 16:02:13 +0000

Other than a Twirl (“You can’t top the taste of a Twirl”) my absolute favourite dirty* chocolate snack is a bag of Revels. For those of you unfamiliar with Revels they are a chocolate coated sweet with a possibility of five different centres. Revels offer me just enough tastebud excitement without verging on the kerrr-azy territory of bacon chocolate and even if I get my least favourite Malteaser one I know that the next one is possibly going to be a coffee one (best revel of all). Revels really do have it all. [caption id="attachment_3422" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Rob Davis - 1968[/caption] Worry not, dear reader, they have not secretly changed Graphixia to become a confectionary blog, rather I am trying in my own clumsy way to describe what it is that is just so lovely about Nelson, the subject of this post here today. Nelson is a so-called “collective graphic novel” published in 2011, edited by Rob Davis and Woodrow Phoenix and the fruits of a collaboration between 54 (yes, you did read that correctly) artists. In brief Nelson tells the story of one Nel, born in London in 1968, Nel’s parents thought she was going to be a boy and so were going to call him Nelson, instead they had twins, Nel and Sonny, though Sonny died very soon after his birth. The spectre of her twin brother haunts Nel throughout the book and the responsibility of living for the both of them weighs heavily upon her. The story is told via a series of 54 snapshots set in the years between 1968 and 2011. Each section is by a different artist and the range of styles, colours and tones across the whole book is breathtaking. It was the first publication from the UKCC, United Kingdom Comics Collective, but I really hope for lots more. [caption id="attachment_3421" align="aligncenter" width="225"] Nelson Cover[/caption] I love the idea of anthologies and the prospect of reading work by new-to-me creators, however when I find one that I love or a story I am engrossed in I find myself getting frustrated by the end of that contribution by the fact that it is over so soon. I was therefore unsure about Nelson but swayed enough by the gallons of praise being poured upon it on Twitter to give it a try. And surprise, surprise I loved it. Nel is an engaging heroine right from the very start and it is a delight to see her character developing and being fleshed out as different artists get their hands on her. The overarching storyline of Nel’s life, loves and various careers is handled deftly with enough continuity to ensure that the story continues to flow throughout. However it isn’t just Nel that stands out as a great character, the people that surround her, her emotionally damaged parents, her oh-so perfect sister and her best friend Tabitha are all given the space and time to become integral parts of Nel’s history. Given the sheer logistical difficulties involved in coordinating 54 different artists to tell one story I find the way in which secondary characters are handled particularly effective. [caption id="attachment_3423" align="aligncenter" width="217"] Jon McNaught - 1993[/caption] The impact of each artist being given a distinct time period in Nel’s life is two fold, the change in tone created by the differences in style between the enormous number of artists gives each section a truly distinct feeling that underlines the enormous changes that Nel’s undergoes throughout her life. The amount of attention that must have gone into deciding upon the order in which the artists would appear in the book and which sections of Nel’s life they would each approach must have been enormous and you can tell the care and attention that was put into decisions like this. For example the transition between Warren Pleece’s contribution for 1988 with its bright colours and strong lines to the gentle, muted and regimented work of Kristina Baczynski for 1989 perfectly reflects the changes happening in Nel’s life at this point. In 1988 she is an art student in Manchester and in control of almost every aspect of her own life however by the time we see her again in 1989 she has left Art School and has returned to living with her mum. Pleece’s work breaks free of its frames and ably reflects Nel’s own desire to break down the structures that she feels so constrained by. However by the time she is returning home to live with her mum, her life is being forced back to fit into one room again and so Baczkynski’s neat and even drawings with its regular use of very small frames perfectly reflects the way in which Nel’s life and personality is being constrained by these changes. [caption id="attachment_3427" align="alignleft" width="300"] Warren Pleece - 1988[/caption] [caption id="attachment_3420" align="alignright" width="300"] Kristina Baczynski - 1989[/caption] Similarly after Nel’s father’s death as she struggles with work, life and her mental health, the style of the artwork is distinctly more muted in tone, as Nel struggles to maintain control of her students, her drinking and her life, she finally reaches a crisis point in 2002 and Duncan Fegredo’s use of simple blue and sepia tones to depict this pivotal moment fits perfectly. Philippa Rice’s naïve and childlike figures follow this section and again this underlines the way in which Nel is rebuilding her life from the ground up following her breakdown. ‘Nelson’ doesn’t just work as a novel or gimmicky way in which to demonstrate the range and scope of comics artistry on offer in the United Kingdom today. I did, of course, thoroughly enjoy the opportunity to see the work of new-to-me artists that I have since read more of. However to my mind the really awesome thing about ‘Nelson’ is just she sheer scope and achievement of this collaboration and how it was the perfect way to tell this story. Normally when we discuss collaboration in comics we’re talking about collaborations between a handful of creators, usually each taking responsibility for a distinct area of the comics’ production. Nelson offers a different model of comics collaboration that tells a simple story in a novel and exciting way. Without wanting an inundation of cheap imitations I would love to see another story told in this way, few stories and characters over recent years have touched me as much as Nel and her life's tale. *I use dirty here in the sense that it is not the artisan produced, beautifully bitter, herb scented chocolate that I am probably meant to claim I love above all things. ** Credit for the excellent title added one hour after publication goes to Damon Herd. Thanks Damon!

#152 A Collaborative Dump

damon — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 22:43:46 +0000

For this week’s post I’d like to give a little insight into a collaboration process that I have gone through recently. My first comics collaboration happened when I was about 8 years old. A pal and I created a strip that was a rip-off of Danger Mouse. We didn’t do anything with it, I don’t think we even finished it. It was just a way to pass some time doing something we both enjoyed. It was 30 years before I collaborated on another comic, while I was studying for my MA illustration. One of the projects involved teaming up with a writer from Edinburgh University’s creative writing MA. We were paired at random but ‘my’ writer, Chris Lindores, was also into comics. We decided that I would illustrate an existing poem of Chris’s and we met a few times to discuss the adaptation. Although the poem was based on real events - my love of autobiographical comics showing through! - there was a shared liking for Batman so that somehow crept in. Looking back the strip is OK, if a little literal, too much show AND tell going on. [caption id="attachment_3443" align="aligncenter" width="650"] Words by Chris Lindores, art by Damon Herd[/caption] At the end of last year another opportunity for collaboration came up when my friend, the cartoonist David Robertson, asked me if I would like to contribute a one page strip to the next issue of his comic Dump. Much like myself, David is quite content to be producing his own comics purely for the sake of making comics. This isn’t a get rich quick scheme or the first step in a career in the movies, this is making comics for the love of comics. With a day job and family to occupy most of his time David manages to produce strips whenever he gets a spare moment, and gradually the stories build up until he has enough material to publish a book. His comics are refreshingly uncynical and have a wry sense of humour. Whenever I host a DeeCAP comics performance event in Dundee I always ask David to contribute, as this humour comes through in his deadpan delivery, and he knows how to work an audience. [caption id="attachment_3451" align="alignleft" width="300"] Cover of Dump issue 2 by David Robertson[/caption] Dump serialises David’s ongoing strip Dump, which details the adventures of Bert, the main character from David’s webcomic, Berserkotron, who now works at the local rubbish tip. The book also acts as a repository (or dump) for David’s other strips, including One Day at Space Wizard Central (a highlight at a previous DeeCAP) and History of E-mail and the Internet. For the latest issue he decided to collaborate with artists Neil Paterson, Keara Stewart, Donna Law, and Stephen Boyd, as well as myself, on five one page strips. David wrote the scripts and we produced the art, apart from Stephen’s strip, where David wrote the story to fit existing artwork. David actually gave the artists a choice on whether they wanted to write and draw their own strips but everyone decided to illustrate David’s scripts. Typical of us lazy artists! But we should be careful what we wish for. When the script arrived it wasn’t what I was expecting. I thought it would be all text, dialogue with descriptions of the scenes, but what turned up was a fully sketched out page with thumbnailed panel layouts and dialogue. I joked that David was ‘no Stan Lee’ because he had supplied such detailed scripts, no Marvel method here! At first I didn’t think this left much room for collaboration, David had asserted what Scott called his ‘textual authority’ but as I read through the script I realised that there were certain things I could bring to the page. David’s script was set out on a strict 12-panel grid and I felt that the flow of the page could be improved slightly. I wanted to contain on one row the sequence of three panels that occurs in one character’s head. This meant rejigging the other panels on the page, I had to expand the previous two panels to fill a row and lose a panel on the final tier. This seemed to work as I could still put all the remaining dialogue in the final three panels, or so I thought (more on that in a moment). So, while the underlying grid was still 12 panels, I had managed to tell the same story in 11 panels. As the scene was basically two people talking in an office I used Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work, to help with a few panels (you might notice the ones I swiped). [caption id="attachment_3459" align="aligncenter" width="650"] David's original thumbnails (L) & Damon's (R)[/caption] I sent David a rough sketch of my layout and he remarked that he liked the two panel ‘Smith and Jones’ row but was worried that I wasn’t using all the dialogue. I assured him that I would but had only scribbled a few lines on the layout sketch for speed. Turns out he was right to worry. I sent him the finished scan just before Christmas (I think he was tapping his feet waiting on me so he could send the finished book to the printers). A copy of the freshly printed comic dropped through my letterbox soon after the New Year and I was very pleased to see how it turned out. I met up with David last week and we discussed how the process had gone. He had been really pleased with how each cartoonist had approached his scripts, a couple of us had moved a few panels around but the strips still presented David’s stories. Then he pointed out something missing from my finished strip - half the dialogue in the final three panels! Apparently the scan he sent me was incomplete so I never received the text, however the strip still made sense so I never noticed. David had wondered if he should ask me to redo the strip, but agreed that it still made sense even if it wasn’t exactly what he had intended. Also, the repositioning that I did to his panels would not have worked as well if I had tried to squeeze in the missing dialogue. [caption id="attachment_3465" align="aligncenter" width="650"] Penultimate two panels as supplied (L) & as drawn (R)[/caption] I think that is the joy of a collaboration, things don’t quite turn out the way you planned them. Another person’s interpretation of the same problem will likely generate different results from your own, and hopefully the input from two people creates something that neither of you would have produced on your own. It is like the ‘mathematics’ of comics, words + images = something much more than just a simple combination of the two.

#153 Comic Books: Art Made in the Assembly Line

ernestop — Tue, 04 Feb 2014 16:39:06 +0000

The smooth surfaces of our modern-day computers and mobile devices (phones, tablets, e-readers) can often hide the complex history of their making.

Whereas it can be argued that the "digital age" has democratised up to a certain extent a "culture of making" by encouraging people to create and share open-source code, the software and hardware of today can simultaneously alienate users from an awareness of the material conditions of production that still underpin creative labour. This is related to a tendency to think that these current devices are making "collaboration" possible in a way that did not exist before. A look back at the history of comic books as cultural products implies a look at how these publications were made.

Before the use of digital computers in the production of mainstream comic books became widespread in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a convoluted assembly-line process was standarised. It often involved a range of agents, and I'd like to argue that this process helped to define the expressive boundaries and possibilities of the medium and the specific texts it produced. The available tools defined specific roles, and this specific roles were located at more-or-less fixed steps or positions within the process. These steps also played a role in defining an authorial/creative hierarchy, and ultimately in defining the identity of different comic book authors within the industry and within the produced textualities as well. Hence, for example, the penciller used pencils; the inker, inks. Other roles within the process were not specific tool-dependent, but implied a variety of other tools that implicitly imposed particular modes of behaviour and expression.

The participants in the production chain used their own respective “tools of the trade”, and the levels of authorial involvement varied greatly from one participant to another. With this method of production, the editor and publisher remained the all-seeing eye in the process; they were the agents with the clearest conceptual vision of what the finished product would look like (for a fascinating visual itinerary of the changes in the textual topology of a comic book in progress, see Gibbons, Watching the Watchmen, 2008; also useful is the now-classic Lee and Buscema, 1977. For academic engagements, see McAllister et al 2002; Gibbons 2008).

The process could be as diverse as there were comics authors, and many did not follow identical steps. Nevertheless it is possible to infer a general work flow, a standard industrial process that mainstream publishers used to impose as a production line: [caption id="attachment_3475" align="aligncenter" width="451"] This diagram describes the convoluted process of multi-authored mainstream American comic books. It imposed constraints of all types, and forced those involved in the creation of comic books to work within those limits. Diagram CC-BY Ernesto Priego[/caption] Conceptualised as such, the process could start either with the writer, the editor and publisher or the artists (usually the penciller). It can be assumed that often the writer first produced a typewritten script that was sent to the editor for approval, who in turn may have had it sent back to the writer for revisions. The penciller produced a basic layout for the story, not dissimilar to a movie storyboard, either before or after receiving the typewritten script via the editor. The process continued through the inker who went over the penciller's traces, then the colourist who illuminated the previously inked illustrations using several manual or mechanical techniques; then the letterer, who calligraphically or mechanically added the written words to the page. By then the editor would already have commissioned a cover from different artist(s) (who may have followed the same process as the inside pages' artists), and everything was put together as a coherent textual whole by a graphic and editorial designing team. The whole package was sent back to the editor and proofreaders, and if no further corrections were deemed necessary then the whole mechanic or pre-press original was sent to the printer. Though it is not depicted in the diagram, proof copies were sometimes sent back to the editor for approval, since colour separation techniques, paper and ink quality, etc., also affected the finished publication. The printer would in turn deliver it to the distributors in charge of selling the books to the readers through their established channels. The heritage of 18^th century caricature and 19^th century illustrated journals is historically embedded in this industrial system that juxtaposes artistic creation with mechanical reproduction. The techniques used to create the illustrations and often the texts themselves were varied, from wood engraving (1770s) and lithography (1798) to the relief halftone (1852). These methods confounded creation and reproduction, and became popular because they increased the speed with which publications were produced and lowered the cost and broadened the audience for these illustrated materials. This created an explosion in the illustrated publications industry in the United States and Europe between 1850 and 1890, and set the industrial conditions for serialised production that would define mainstream comic book publishing a century later. The influence of technological development in the history of the artistic evolution of the comic book in the late 1930s and the early 1940s is no different, but the differences between comic strips published in daily or weekly newspapers and the production of longer narratives in monthly or bi-weekly stand-alone flexible spine publications imposed a different set of possibilities and constraints. Until the 1950s, even though comic strips were often created with the help of assistants, the work was credited to a single author. Whilst comic strips authors largely worked alone or from home, collaborating with others often through the post, the studios where animation films were made were not unlike medieval scriptoria, where authorial work was carried out collectively and the auctor/scribes/artists worked together on individual desks. These working spaces were proper artwork factories. and the influence they must have had on the superhero comics of the late 1940s and 1950s cannot be underestimated. [caption id="attachment_3477" align="aligncenter" width="287"] The Max Fleischer Studios in 1935, where Jack Kirby started his career (Evanier 2008).[/caption]

Kimmelman (1996) offers a discussion of the concept of auctor that could well be applied to understand the role of comic book authors during the Golden and Silver Ages of American comic books. The common traits between the production lines in factories and comics and animation studies also underscore the material conditions of production of comic books and animated films and shows. British graffiti artist Banksy directed an episode of the American animation series The Simpsons, aired on 10 October 2010. In the introduction to the show, the viewer sees an East Asian factory where rows of workers in terrible conditions hand-colour frames of the cartoon, a clear critique of the industrial conditions of production involved in mainstream animation

It must also be said that the visual representation and self-representation of comic book artists through photographs, drawings and paintings of the artists sitting at their desks and surrounded by their tools deserves closer study (see Priego 2010). In October 2010, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC was formally presented with a 1986 photograph by Yousuf Karsh of cartoonist Charles M. Schulz sitting at his desk with a Peanuts strip in progress next to a collection of pens. The Smithsonian Institution has traditionally been very welcoming of comic art, but this is a significant event since it is the first portrait of a cartoonist to make it to the walls of the American National Portrait Gallery.

The comic strip artist who published his work on daily or weekly newspapers was known for his manual skill and speed with which he could both write and draw. For reproduction purposes nothing more than a photostat in black and white of the original strip was required (composed of black ink on white paper). Sunday colour supplements required a more complicated procedure, involving colour separations made without the strip artist's control (Gordon 1988). In the late 1950s and early 1960's the conditions under which the modern comic book was produced differed for several reasons. The division of labour as exemplified in the diagram above was essentially a corporate attempt at protecting the publishing companies' intellectual property (by taking advantage of the creators' work, who rightfully claimed authorship of the published material). According to Dowd, the division of labour in comic book production “is not really necessary except as an asset protection strategy” (2004:18). However, a case can be made that these production conditions established the artistic, commercial, cultural and social boundaries of the comic book. References Dowd, D.B., and Hignite, T. (eds.) (2004) Strips, Toons and Bluesies: Essays in Comics and Culture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press) Gibbons, D. (2008) Watching the Watchmen (London: Titan Books) Gordon, I. (1998) Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890-1945. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press) Kimmelman, B. (1996) The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages. The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona. (New York: Peter Lang Publishing) Lee, S. and Buscema, S. (1977) How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. (New York: Simon & Schuster) McCallister, M.P., E.H. Sewel Jr., and I. Gordon, eds. (2002) Comics and Ideology (New York: Peter Lang Publishers) Priego, E. (2010) "The Digital Scriptoria: Textuality and Materiality", Opticon 1826 Research Images, available at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/opticon1826/archive/issue9/imagegallery/Image_Priego.pdf [PDF]. Accessed 4 February 2014 Sillars, S. (1995) Visualisation in Popular Fiction 1860-1960. (London and New York: Routledge) --- This post is part of a series of short articles around the general topic of "digital comics" that I will be posting as part of my residency this month (February 2014) as curator of the Digital Reading Network's blog. As explained on their 'About' page, "The Digital Reading Network brings together academics, practitioners, stakeholders and ordinary readers to explore the impact of digitisation on readers and reading, with a focus on the reading of literary texts." It is funded by the UK's AHRC within the Digital Transformations theme.

#154 Collaborative (Auto)Biography: L’enfance d’Alan

benoit — Tue, 11 Feb 2014 20:00:15 +0000

Comics entail collaborative practices in various ways: not only because they most often are the product of cultural industries based on a division of labor, but also on a formal level because of their fragmented structure. As Jared Gardner argues in Projections, "comics bring together different semantic systems (figural, textual, symbolic) into a crowded field where meaning is both collaborative and competitive – between images, between frames, and between reader and writer" (xi). Creating comics as well as reading them are collaborative activities. In this post, I would like to comment on Emmanuel Guibert’s recent L’enfance d’Alan (2012), where the collaborative structure of the work is dependent on its collaborative production. L’enfance d’Alan [Alan’s childhood] is the ‘sequel’ to La guerre d’Alan [Alan’s war], which was serialized in three volumes by L’Association. It focuses on the childhood of Alan Ingram Cope, a WWII soldier who eventually settled in France. Emmanuel Guibert met Cope by chance, when asking him for directions. They became friends and Cope started telling him his stories. Alan Ingram Cope passed away in 1999, just before the release of the first volume in 2000. La guerre d’Alan and L’enfance d’Alan result from these taped conversations. That is not the kind of collaboration one might have in mind when talking about comics: it does not rely on a strict division of labor (writer, penciller, inker, colorist, and so on), and Emmanuel Guibert is clearly an author who, in this particular case, carries out (nearly) all the facets of the creative work by himself. In the preface to the collected edition of La guerre d’Alan, Guibert mentioned that Cope gave him carte blanche to draw his life, only correcting some minor technical details. Cope does not provide a script, he is not creating a fictional story as a professional writer, he is simply telling his life-story for Guibert to pin down, primarily because of the friendship that formed between both men. Thinking about Peter’s post, collaboration might in this case first be ‘love’ instead of ‘work’. Even though Cope’s actual participation in the creative production seems minor–he ‘merely’ recounts his life to the artist–, his words are the only textual elements present in the comic books. The captions that run throughout are all extracted from Cope’s oral storytelling and Guibert chose to restitute his stories as he told them, transcribing them as faithfully as possible. His own work consists in operating a selection, placing the textual bits within panels and page arrangements, and illustrating them. From that perspective, Guibert’s role could be relegated to that of ‘mere’ illustrator. Of course, trying to impose such a hierarchy seems rather futile and unproductive: despite its auteurist appearance, it clearly is the result of a productive collaboration, where both parts are equally essential. Following the boundary between text and image, this collaboration, where the text is Cope’s and the art and composition Guibert’s, results in a complex narratological structure. As Jan Baetens remarks: “although author and character coincide, the position of the narrator of this graphic novel is radically split. It is Alan Ingram Cope himself who tells his own story, but what he says is in a certain sense quoted within the broader narrative made by Emmanuel Guibert” (84). This split narratological structure runs along the divide between text and image, resulting in a complex mix of autobiography and biography, first- and third-person narrative, objectivity and subjectivity which can help us revisit the traditional author-character-narrator coincidence postulated by Lejeune as the defining criterion for autobiography (Baetens 83-84). L’enfance d’Alan might draw this split narration even further than La guerre d’Alan by integrating Guibert’s own immersion in the material in a more substantial way than before. In the preface to La guerre d’Alan, Guibert writes:

Probably because I was missing Alan, the more I was progressing, the more I felt the need to link my personal history more closely with his own. Some time before his death, he had encouraged me to go to California . . . I did it. I had at hand the photographs from the 30s he had passed on to me, and I wandered through the streets of Pasadena and Altadena in search for the houses of his childhood. I found some of them, along with the schools he went to and the church where he sung. (4; my translation)

Although these words are part of the paratext of La guerre d’Alan, they describe a process that is much more apparent in L’enfance d’Alan, which clearly bears the traces of Guibert’s search in his friend’s footsteps. This is evident right from the beginning. The first pages, the only ones in color, function as a kind of prologue to the story. The text follows, as in La guerre d’Alan, Alan’s narrative voice, who shares his memories of Southern California. He talks about the impact of the war, the changes it brought about in the surrounding landscape: the tremendous growth in population, the arrival of cars, the pollution. The images illustrate this theme of change in a way that mingles Guibert’s travel to California, in search for traces of his friend’s childhood. The first pages, all in color, only consist of spread pages, each turn of the page supplanting one image to the other in a cinematic way. These pages are further reminiscent of the traditional movie sequence of a car ride shot with an onboard camera. They offer snapshots of a road trip in 21st century California, built up of skyscrapers and large multi-lane highways. This sequence does not address directly the post-war changes that affected Alan’s homeland, but records the changes that Guibert is confronted with in his search for Alan’s past. Guibert also incorporates many of the photographs he inherited from Alan into the narrative by drawing them in a slightly more detailed style that foregrounds their original status. This sustained reliance on (drawn) photographs further reflects the imaginative act involved in Guibert’s illustrating work. As Alan probably commented on these many photographs, Guibert often uses them as narrative images, expanding their story into the comic. In a particularly interesting fragment, Alan gives a tender and intimate portrait of his mother, sketching a broad picture as well as mentioning some poignant details (30-34). The images that accompany this description are not illustrations in the sense that they do not picture the events or details Alan is referring to. However, they are illustrative on a thematic level insofar as they depict an intimate moment between Alan and his mother: the sequence follows, along four pages, Alan being dressed by his mother in what appears to be a mariner’s outfit. The last image of the sequence, cleverly situated on a left page and thus coming as a surprise effect with the turn of the page, reveals a photograph of Alan dressed in his outfit, in the arms of his mother. Just as the road sequence could be associated with Guibert’s travel, the visual sequence here unveils Guibert’s imaginative work to record the history of the photograph, and to get at a sense of Alan’s life beyond the material he is left with. His biographical undertaking implies making do with the material he has accumulated while Alan was still alive. Therefore, telling his friend’s story after his death involves an act of reconstruction which is necessarily associative. La guerre d’Alan and L’enfance d’Alan show a different kind of collaboration in comics. They are not the product of a team of professional artists working together, but results from the meeting of a comics artist with an American expatriate willing to share his story. If they can be seen as an autobiography since we get to read Alan’s own words, they differ from the auteurist autobiographical mode which French cartoonists embraced in the 1990s. We could see them as a collaborative autobiography, where Alan’s account of his own life is inseparable from Guibert’s act of remediation. The collaboration seeps into the relation between text and image of the comic, where each mode convey a distinct narrative voice. In L’enfance d’Alan, the cartoonist’s work of immersion in his friend’s life reaches a point where it oddly becomes a form of self-exploration, one that is visually recorded and that parallels Alan’s own self-narrative. Works Cited Baetens, Jan. “Graphic Novels: Literature without Text?” English Language Notes 46.2 (2008): 77-88. Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. Guibert, Emmanuel. La guerre d’Alan. 2nd edition. Paris: L’Association, 2012. ——. L’enfance d’Alan. 3rd edition. Paris: L’Association, 2012.

#155 Color in Comics: The Case of Matt Kindt

wilkinsp — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 04:37:42 +0000

In a previous Graphixia sequence on things that we hated in comics, I chose to write about overly saturated, glossy art. This post that initiates a sequence on color in comics has an ironic relationship to that earlier post. The example I chose of the art that I did not like was from Mind the Gap. I started on Mind the Gap by mistake. I had read somewhere that there was a fabulous comic with the word “mind” in the title, but I couldn’t remember what the rest of the title was. I thought I had hit upon it when I found Mind the Gap, and read several issues, with increasing dismay, until I discovered that it was Matt Kindt’s Mind MGMT that I was really looking for. In terms of look, Mind MGMT is the antithesis of Mind the Gap: sketchy lines and daubs of watercolors create a viewing experience that seems raw, warm, and immediate in comparison. In this post, I am trying to get at why that appeals to me so much, particulary when it comes to colour. If any aspect of comics reveals my ignorance of art in any technical sense, it is colour. I don’t understand how colour works at all. But, I suppose, I know what I like. When I was a kid, reading American comics from Marvel (mostly) and DC, I took colour for granted. Comics always had colour as a matter of course. The kind of colour they had in the mid–70s was whatever could characterize the gritty American city, mainly New York. The atmosphere was dark. I think colour in comics at that time was influenced by two cinematic phenomena: noir (like Chinatown) and urban police stories (like Serpico and the French Connection), though I have no evidence for this. Though these phenomena were stylized and fantastic, it was common at the time to take them as “realistic.” The only comic that broke this mould was Superman, and consequently I never read it; it was too bright and sunny. I prefered the colours of Spider-man. It took European comics like Tintin and Asterix to make me appreciate bright, bold colours. Such blue skies. No sky was ever the brilliant blue of a Gaul sky, but that didn’t matter. The artificial flatness and brightness of Franco-Belgian comics made me consider that it was alright that the world looked nothing like this because colour could be emblematic as well as realistic; I wished the world was in those colours. The “ligne claire” style lends itself to a certain precision that the colours inform while they also remind us that precision does not equal realism: quite the contrary. Then, when I was about 15 (1977 maybe), I picked up some Marvel comics on a family trip to the UK. I was stunned to discover that they were not only in a different format–short and wide–but also that they were in black and white. In The Avengers, it was strange to see Captain America, not in his red, white, and blue, but in mere outline. At the time I was disconcerted, I couldn’t figure out whether I had been ripped off, or whether it was kind of neat to have comics presented to me in this new (to me) form. Those English Avengers comics perhaps gave me what I now get from looking at Bryan Lee O’Malley’s black and white Scott Pilgrim or the work of the Hernandez brothers: a sense of openness and empty space, an unsaturated world. My pleasure could come from either allowing my imagination to fill in colour where it is missing, or, more likely, from having less visual information to register. On reflection, I believe that colour in comics acts as an aesthetic, and perhaps cognitive, block for me. There is something about colour that stops me getting at something else: the austerity of the inked line, the either/or contrast of black and white, the pull of a partly unfinished world. Somehow, Matt Kindt’s watercolors in Mind MGMT manage to satisfy me in a way that black and white comics generally do. That is, rather than being an interference, or simply a neutral element, Kindt’s watercolors maintain the allure of the “unfinished” that I get from black and white. In an interview with Bloody Disgusting, Kindt talks about how he originally worked with black and white and then added watercolour one day and never went back. This quality of Kindt’s work stems from its “handmade” appearance. Mind MGMT is the opposite of “ligne claire”, the lines are sketchy, kind of chaotic, and the colour is beautifully daubed and layered, and yet semi-transparent in the way that watercolor is, giving the effect of still being able to see the paper through the color; the colour stains rather than saturates or obliterates the page. Indeed, there are blank, “white” spaces everywhere, places where the color has not covered the visible surface. The effect is a kind of aura, style, feel, that is both radically unlike most comics, and yet exemplifies everything I like about comics: the combination of rawness and beauty. I don’t usually associate water colours with comics, but there’s something compelling about the broad strokes and semi-intentional blotches of colour and not always staying within the lines, as if the brush is too big and it’s impossible to do really fine work perfectly. Colour spills out of the panels; the lines around the panels sometimes don’t join up, or one line goes a little further than it should. Adjectives like “primitive” and “childlike” come to mind, but do not adequately describe the work. When I close my eyes and think of conventional comics colours, I see reds, blues, bright yellows and greens. When I do the same and think about Mind MGMT I see purples, pinks, and softer yellows. Certainly, I am participating in a kind of mystification in celebrating “the handmade.” For all I know, Kindt uses extensive computerization in the production of his comics, and, with Bandette, Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover have produce a beautiful handmade-looking comic entirely produced on the computer. Dave Stewart, the colorist for Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba’s Daytripper, captures this strange ideological dichotomy between computer and hand coloring:

I use the Cintiq monitor, which Is amazing. I just try to use it as a big paint set. I’d rather try to paint in an effect than let the computer do it. I try to hide the cold, technical side of the computer and let the warmth of the human hand take over. Comics Alliance

Obviously, we’ve never left the world of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in our thinking about the relationship between technology and the handmade in the psyche. While Kindt gives the appearance of having drawn and painted the very pages we are looking at in Mind MGMT, he superimposes the comic grid on a report form, drawing an opposition between the “organicism” of his art and the mechanics of the form with its stringent requirements: “When filing report all essential details must fall within this solid ‘live area’ box. This is the border for a standard non-bleed field report.” Of course some of the “details” of the comic violate these requirements. Furthermore, Mind MGMT is a sort of sci-fi detective story in which characters with wild mental talents are harnessed by government powers who essentially try to turn them into tools. The story is that of incalculable, raw talent subsumed by the mechanical, instrumental, bureaucratic world. Hence, the presentation of the page in Mind MGMT is part of the idea system of the work. The comics grid and the conceptual grid fit together nicely. The regularity of the report form, and even the structure of the panels of the page enter into a meaningful contest with the colors and drawing. Changes in typography, paper size, and margins no doubt affect the way we experience prose fiction, but do they radically transform the content, the words, in anything but an accidental way? Is colour in comics equivalent to typography in prose fiction? To answer this question we would have to do a detailed analysis of reader’s responses to the differences between the colour and black and white versions of the same text, say Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim which is being re-released in colourized form. We should probably conduct such analyses because it would help us understand the differences and similarities between comics and prose narratives in terms of how we process information. Meanwhile, I leave you with my naive reflection on the pleasure of Matt Kindt’s watercolors.

#156 - If It's Colour, It's Crap: Of Palettes and Establishments

admin — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 05:40:24 +0000

It’s an odd juxtaposition that for comics–and a lot of other things–a lack of colour makes what is often thought of as a disposable commodity into Art. The thing about colour is that it makes comics cheap and mainstream. A lack of colour on the other hand, makes comics “underground,” “independent,” “adult,” “intellectual,” and all the other superlatives that we toss around when we want to call comics an artform. I’ve often wondered whether the black and white legitimization of comics has some relationship to our favouring of the black and white cast of text in a novel, or the two-colour black and sepia of the parchment. In other words, a lack of colour allows the critic to attach a literary value to the images since those images can be more readily associated with traditional modes of literary production–like type. Now I hear the grumbling. Independent, avant-garde, whatever comics are black and white because they are cheaply produced, unable to afford the expensive marshalling of primary hues. Well, maybe, but there’s too often a situation where a lack of colour seems to imply gravitas. Take for example Art Speigelman’s Maus, often brought forward as the first outstanding contribution to comic-based story-telling. Can one even image what Maus would be like as a full colour spread? There are moments of colour in independent or “literary” comics like Maus, or those by Satrapi, Sacco, Eisner, Lutes, Bechdel, Sim (that list alone proves my point really well), namely in the covers. But, most of the time, a lack of colour means something significant; it means the story in the comic is heavy, rarefied, thoughtful, insightful. It means the comic has something important to say, something that Superman or Batman or Archie–almost always printed in primary colours–either don’t say or don’t want to say. Even when comics drift away from that traditional primary colour palette, it means something. So, if not a lack of colour, a shift in colour palette means something. Take for instance Dave Gibbons’ move away from the traditional palette in the ground-breaking Watchmen, or Miller’s overly dark palette in The Dark Knight Returns. Again, a turn away from the expectations of colour suggests legitimacy, or a turn away from the commodity of comics toward something with resonance and substance–something that a book like Hawkeye is also doing so kudos to Matt Hollingsworth. Point is, colour functions as a the property of commodity. Colour is advertising, colour is attention-getting. In short, its all the things we hate about mass-produced imagery and symbolism. We rarely talk about colour unless we are taking about it as in opposition to something, like I am now–black and white, different palettes. Oddly, colour seems to suggest a kind of cheap, mass-produced sensibility to the image. Even more oddly, I have no idea where this sensibility comes from or why it still holds, even today. A lot of comics, especially the slice of life, memoir, historiographical productions that currently dominate the “literary” comics market still seem bent of doing two-colour or non-colour spreads. What’s important here is to recognize that colour for comics seems to be the mark of the establishment. It’s a particular kind of colour carry ing that mark too–a primary colour emphasis often overtly crisp and saturated. It’s also important to recognize that colour, as such a representative thing, is therefore entangled in the political dichotomy that itself marks comic production. A statement against primary colours is a statement against the establishment. While it sometimes legitimizes itself in terms of economics, non-colour in comics is also a political statement against what is often perceived as a canned narrative or repetitive storyline toward something more universal, more symbolically rich. It’s always so surprising to me that comics once again seem to inherently reflect the cultural vibe surrounding it. Pause for a moment and think different about what a company like Apple has co-opted in terms of colour. The company’s comeback was marked by a push in tangerine, blueberry, and green apple–a move completely off the tope / green-digit-dos palette we expected for home computers. Now, positioned as one of the most innovative corporations in the world, we salivate over the white iphone (it’s telling that the original iphone came only in black–a nod to Henry Ford’s Model T) and the recently introduced gold iphone 5S–again, off the palette. Again, the trajectory of comics, the symbolism and entrenched ideologies that mark the artform launch gleefully into the world of high-tech marketing, providing the archetype for legitimizing that technology as innovative and independent. Understanding how colour works as a metaphor for the establishment in comics gives way to the symbolisms activated by its absence.

#157 Monochromatic Palettes and Super Serious Archie Comics

Grayb — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 04:51:45 +0000

[caption id="attachment_3524" align="alignleft" width="200"] It's, um, a different tone for Archie Comics, see.[/caption] We've been talking colour around here at Graphixia, and it's a handy thing we are because I've been thinking a lot about how colour functions in a new, totally terrific series I've been reading lately: Afterlife with Archie. It's sort of a very-special-episode with a zombie apocalypse twist, where Archie Comics get very serious with a T-rated horror series (it's a riff on Life with Archie, get it?) by the dynamic super-villain team of Francesco Francavilla and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. And listen, even as a long-time fan of Archie for playground fun, I was surprised by this one. It's complicated, dark, and adds some genuinely challenging layers to the Archie paradigms. In fact, it deals better with some of Archie's most recent challenging story lines than the standard story lines have. When I read Dave's post last week, I realized that Afterlife with Archie is a good case study for the ideas he was playing with. Dave notes that, in the throw away world of (as Damon helpfully pointed out via the Twitterspehere, North American!) weekly comics, garish colour denotes their cheap nature:

The thing about colour is that it makes comics cheap and mainstream. A lack of colour on the other hand, makes comics “underground,” “independent,” “adult,” “intellectual,” and all the other superlatives that we toss around when we want to call comics an artform.

But where Dave was talking about the preference for black and white in serious, literary-type comics, I want to talk about the use of monochrome orange and black in Afterlife with Archie to denote the tone shift from the happy-go-lucky world of traditional Archie Comics to this particularly dark, grim, and black world. The comics are not entirely monochromatic: Francesco Francavilla uses a range of oranges, yellows, blues, and greys to narrow the usual broad spectrum of primary colours and create a creepy, complex mood. The traditional Archie colour palette, like many of the penny comics of its era, is a bubble gum primary one: bright colours like Archie's signature orange hair and red letterman sweater, for example, or Betty's not subtle blonde but rather bright yellow hair. The bright, simple colours align with the bright, simple plot lines. As Dave remarks:

What’s important here is to recognize that colour for comics seems to be the mark of the establishment. It’s a particular kind of colour carry ing that mark too–a primary colour emphasis often overtly crisp and saturated.

There's nothing safer or more establishment than an Archie Comic, right? But the colour scheme of Afterlife with Archie signals something different. Caution: serious comic ahead! The simplified colour palette here, as Dave gestured to last week, suggests something significant:

Even when comics drift away from that traditional primary colour palette, it means something. So, if not a lack of colour, a shift in colour palette means something.

Here it signals to us the significant thematic shift in the comic to a world of Archie where Betty and Veronica dress provocatively and make nasty, slut-shaming comments to each other; the Principal and Miss Grundy get all flirty once they're out of the eyesight of students; Reggie kills a dog and makes vaguely date-rape-y jokes; Cheryl Blossom (once too risqué for the Archie universe) has a weirdly incestuous relationship with her brother; and Nancy and Ginger are lesbians who consciously call out the fact that only "perfect" gays get to live in Riverdale, as I pointed out a few months back. People die in this Riverdale, and in really horrific ways, too. I recommend you check out this new Archie alternate universe, even if you're not typically a fan. It's a different take on Riverdale that is definitely worth a second look. But it's also a concrete example of what Dave was talking about: the full-colour spectrum denotes the throw-away, and alternative colour palettes let you know when to get serious about comics.

#158 Personalizing Reader Engagement: Exploring Colouring in Comics

smarsden — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 06:32:36 +0000

Colour is a subject that was rarely explored or even acknowledged in comics in their earliest days – colour was simply a given, with a palette of four colours used in various lackluster combinations as a standard. Black and white was reserved for newspaper offerings, and the general expectation from the advent of the regular comic book (beginning essentially with Classics Illustrated) was that comic images required a colourist in order to be published and purchased. This presented some problems early on when consistency was also expected, however, with a notable example being one of Superman’s first appearances in The New York World’s Fair Comics #1 in April of 1939 in which he actually had blonde hair – it’s an interesting exercise to think on how something as simple as an alternate hair colour changes our understanding of iconic characters. The visual discrepancy highlights a key point that we don’t often recognize about comics: more than facial characteristics, more than consistency in storytelling and character development, more than nearly any other element of comics, expectations of colour are demanded by their readers once they’ve been established. Colour often carries with it subtle (and not so subtle) meanings: the red and blue costume of Superman representing American idealism (as in Captain America, as in Spider-Man), the blue-blacks and grays of Batman representing a lack of allegiance to laws in his vigilantism, the browns and yellows of Wolverine representing his animal nature and ferocity, the green of Green Lantern stressing something both alien yet natural – bound in these colours are the metaphors of identity and what they’re meant to represent to the reader in term of ideals. We don’t discuss them, likely, because they’re difficult to pin down and even more difficult to agree on, as even with the short list above I’m sure I’d encounter a few alternate and heated perspectives in Wednesday comic shop debates, let alone with my readers here. Regardless of what you think of as being the meaning behind the colouring, whether in hair, costume, skin tone or landscape, it’s difficult to argue with the fact that it carries embedded meaning. Draw his chiseled jaw more softly, give him stubble, have him curse or even kill, and Superman is still Superman. Try to imagine him in a green costume (or give him blond hair) however, and this is no longer the case. Even in radical alterations of continuity by authors who want to put their own stamp on a character or genre, dramatic colouring differences are never even attempted, as both artists and readers know they would fail. Scott McCloud’s theory of reduction can be applied here, though it’s not quite what he intended it for: when we encounter a drawing that is photorealistic, we see only the specific image and are drawn along a single narrative pathway. As images become more, say, “comicky,” with starker lines and less shading, they become universal, allowing us to imbue them with everyman qualities and inject ourselves into the storytelling: Applied to colouring in comics, this logic has a twofold effect here – it both heightens our sensitivity to the metaphors that are intended by the colourist to elicit, while at the same time allowing all of our subjective applications of what we suppose that metaphor should elicit because they’re never overtly stated. And unlike in dialogue or even image, we are rarely trained to be aware of these responses, and so they operate predominantly on a subconscious level. This is not to say that mainstream comics do not experiment with colourless stories for well-known characters; they certainly do, but when this happens they typically draw great attention to this fact for a particular purpose. The currently running DC title “Batman: Black and White” is a key example – now in its second (or third?) volume, the miniseries offers short tales, ranging from three to ten pages at most, that showcase particular artists while offering brief biographies of what they offer to the industry. Operating outside of continuity, these stories are there to be able to highlight the “art” of Batman, allowing the reader not to get lost in the metaphors that colour provides and instead concentrate on the pencils of the artist and the story itself. This tactic also ostensibly plays to the standard approach to understanding black and white as being the domain of the indie comic that assumes a loftier goal in terms of depth and storytelling, and the vignettes in the series typically shoot for this kind of high art. Despite this dramatic purpose, however, it’s ultimately ineffective, as we’re too familiar with what the colours should be already – the characters and scenes draw upon so deep a history that they may as well already be coloured. Reading a black and white Batman brooding over Gotham, it is hard to imagine a single reader envisioning him in anything other than a black and grey costume with a wet, rusty gray pall cast over the cityscape.

The “sketch cover,” now a staple of the mainstream comics’ industry, is perhaps a little more effective here, as it offers as a variant a single image that has been reduced (or enhanced) to colourlessness for collectors. Placing these side by side, we can see how great an impact that colour can have on a reader, and Michael Turner’s beautifully detailed Civil War covers, each released with a 1:75 sketch variant, work well to highlight the point:

The contrast is striking, but difficult to define in terms of reader response. Is the colourless cover more of an art object now that it is in pencil, with only a single contributor? Does it represent the story within in the same way as the original, coloured cover, and is it even supposed to? Is it really any different at all, as we implicitly know what colours should be present because we’re familiar with the characters already? Despite these arguably intentional ambiguities, we can’t help but acknowledge that the coloured panel or page “reads” differently for all of the meanings that colour evokes, as does its absence when we find it missing from a space in which we assume it belongs. Colour is a metonym of the most personal nature, and it ushers forth meanings that are significant to us precisely because we don’t realize that they’re there. Black and white may allow us to fill the empty spaces with what we think should be present, but colour comics do this work for us and thereby allow the chosen colours to carry meaning and weight, adding another layer to the intertextuality that we’re more trained for when accessing dialogue or even juxtaposed images.

#151 Stop, Collaborate and Nelson

admin — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 16:02:13 +0000

#156 If It's Colour, It's Crap: Of Palettes and Establishments

admin — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 05:40:24 +0000

#159 Seeing Red: Comics, Colour and the Maple Spring

hattiek — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 21:44:39 +0000

[caption id="attachment_3573" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Detail from Thomas B Martin's Cover to Je Me Souviendrai[/caption] I have been dreading this post for weeks now. I didn’t have a clue what to write about colour. I don’t know why but it seemed like the biggest possible challenge. I spent hours gazing wistfully at my bookshelves hoping that one of my books would jump from the shelf, flap its pages a bit and scream gleefully “Look at me, look at how interestingly colourful I am, write about MEEEEEE”. Needless to say this didn’t happen so I just looked wistful some more and felt a bit gloomy and wondered whether a large Gin and Tonic might help. But then, as I sat here working on a paper for an upcoming conference I started to write a little about a comic’s limited colour palette and slowly but surely I put two and two together and had a hazy recollection that I was supposed to be writing about something similar for something else. Finally I realized that not only was I currently writing about a comic with a really interesting and effective use of colour. But also that 90% of the times I had been complaining of not knowing what to write about, and sitting wistfully gazing, I had had this comic in my hands or on my lap. So now I think that I am probably chronically under-caffeinated and really quite dopey (this would also hopefully explain my terrible performance in recent games of Heads Up, for example not knowing what Porky Pig’s surname is!). Now that that entirely unnecessary but illuminating preamble is out of the way, I am going to forge onwards to my discussion of the use of a rather limited palette in the comics, poetry and essay anthology Je Me Souviendrai, published in August 2012 as a response to the events of the so-called Maple Spring in Quebec. The Maple Spring refers to events that occurred in Quebec between the March and June of 2012 in response to government plans to raise tuition fees by 75% over the following 6 years. To demonstrate their support and solidarity for student protests, many wore a small square of red felt and it is this that proved the inspiration for the colour palette of Je Me Souviendrai. Artists use only shades of black, grey, white and red in their comics and the result is extraordinarily effective. The anthology contains a brief history of events, spread throughout the text, poems that also use colour in their construction, essays, plays, comics and full pages of art. (I have just realized that having said in my post about Nelson that I could get frustrated by the reality of anthologies, here I am talking about them two posts in a row. I don’t even recognize myself anymore.) [caption id="attachment_3572" align="aligncenter" width="250"] Fred Jourdain - Je Me Souviendrai[/caption] However, this is a blog about comics and so it is the comics I shall focus upon in this here ramble through my thoughts on colour. Some artists featured in this book, such as Julie Delporte, choose to simply tinge their art with a hint of red, an act that lends a lovely softness to some images. Given that Delporte's work is done in bright crayons, this effect is particularly striking if you are familiar with her work. The overwhelming feeling behind Delporte’s entries are of the hope and possibility that she feels is encouraged by these manifestations of student solidarity and political action and the choice of a soft, dusky reddish grey for her artwork further encourages this idea. However in other cases it serves to underline the menace and suspicion felt by many involved in the protests. Antoine Corriveau’s sketchy line drawings reflect on his own experiences during the strikes and he also takes the time to reflect on the political situation more generally. In those panels in which Antoine expresses concern or worry about a particular event or the state of politics, his cross hatching becomes tinged with a reddish hue, for example the panel in which he depicts the arrest of Amir Khadir. Many of the artists make direct reference to the tradition of the red squares in their pictures and comics. In one the artist Genevieve Lafleur-Laplante draws a giant piece of red felt being cut into large squares that are used as capes with which people fly away. In another single page image Melissa Tremblay depicts a young boy folding squares of red paper into paper cranes that fly away. Much like in Delporte’s comics the student movement depicted here is one of hope and possibility. [caption id="attachment_3565" align="aligncenter" width="264"] Melissa Tremblay - Printemps Erable[/caption] Other comics show more innovative use of colour and the device of the red squares, examples such as Chantale Boudreau’s single page which uses several red squares (complete with drawn safety pins at the top) to form the panels in which she tells part of her story. Meanwhile elsewhere, black and white drawings are splattered with red paint or bloody handprints. Philippe Girard’s offering introduces the reader to the superhero Passionrougeman, a becaped superhero with an oversized red square on his chest. In this short story Passionrougeman manages to seduce an uncertain government minister and with his kiss she becomes imbued with the “Red Force” which allows her not to be ashamed of showing her true colours. [caption id="attachment_3564" align="aligncenter" width="209"] PhlppGrrd - Passionrougeman[/caption] Some of the creators featured in this book decided to include the colour brief as part of their story, others chose to highlight particular details by colouring it in red and others chose to impose the red over the top of their near finished pieces of art, as in the case of those photographs that have been tinted red or the comics that have bloody handprints over them. Regardless of the different ways in which the colour is used, what it does do is create a coherent whole of this anthology and link together these different approaches to the events of the Maple Spring. Je Me Souviendrai is an impressive achievement, not only for the short time in which it was conceived and produced, but also for the way in which it demonstrates that comics can be used as an effective, creative and innovative way in which to artistically respond to political events alongside more widely accepted literary forms and that they can more than hold their own in the process. By restricting the colour palette of those creators involved in the book, the editors made a brave choice that challenged the creators further but also created a greater and more engaging whole as a result.

#160 Black And White And Read All Over

damon — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 13:13:55 +0000

A few weeks ago Peter wrote about how when he was a child “reading American comics from Marvel (mostly) and DC, I took colour for granted”. Scott also noted how colour was the default for comics “colour is a subject that was rarely explored or even acknowledged in comics in their earliest days – colour was simply a given, with a palette of four colours used in various lackluster combinations as a standard.” David questioned what this default option meant when it was removed “It’s an odd juxtaposition that for comics - and a lot of other things - a lack of colour makes what is often thought of as a disposable commodity into Art. The thing about colour is that it makes comics cheap and mainstream. A lack of colour on the other hand, makes comics “underground,” “independent,” “adult,” “intellectual,” and all the other superlatives that we toss around when we want to call comics an artform.”

What is interesting about these observations is how much they are a North American perspective on comics. Growing up here in the UK, comics were black and white, and printed on the cheapest of cheap newsprint. The covers, which would often be the only source of colour, were printed on the same paper, no glossy covering to protect the fragile insides like the comics from the US that Peter, David and Scott grew up with in Canada. I was also intrigued by Peter’s reaction to discovering some UK editions of Marvel comics when he was a teenager in the 1970s.

[caption id="attachment_3582" align="aligncenter" width="383"] Colour cover of Hulk Comic #1 (Mar. 7, 1979). © Marvel UK.[/caption]

“Then, when I was about 15 (1977 maybe), I picked up some Marvel comics on a family trip to the UK. I was stunned to discover that they were not only in a different format - short and wide - but also that they were in black and white. In The Avengers, it was strange to see Captain America, not in his red, white, and blue, but in mere outline. At the time I was disconcerted, I couldn’t figure out whether I had been ripped off, or whether it was kind of neat to have comics presented to me in this new (to me) form.”

Marvel UK had the job of reformatting these US strips for the British market who expected black and white as a default, at least in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Here in the UK four colour printing was kept for the cover and centre page spread. Dennis the Menace and the Bash Street Kids were colour but Beryl the Peril and Little Plum were monochrome or sometimes two colour (usually red). Incidentally Dundee Council have just named a street Bash Street and it now has the UK’s only street sign with cartoon characters, at least deliberately!

I vividly remember the Marvel UK Hulk Comic, which I must have picked up because I was a huge fan of the Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno starring TV show. To me it wasn’t strange that these comics were devoid of colour, that’s what comics looked like! I actually read Tintin and Asterix (in full colour) as well, often sitting in the library for hours poring over them, but they were different from the weekly comics I read, they were proper books! The back up strips in these Marvel UK comics were created by British talent and they sometimes used these lack-of-colour limitations very well. The pages that stick in my head were of Night Raven drawn by David Lloyd. I remember the atmospheric artwork with its thick blacks which was made to printed in monochrome. Lloyd later drew V for Vendetta, another work with strong use of chiaroscuro which was eventually coloured (some would say ruined) for the American market. For more info on Marvel UK see Dez Skinn's website.

As a teenager I read 2000AD which was printed in black and white like any other comic, apart from the cover and centre spread usually reserved for their star character Judge Dredd. In the 1980s printing technology had advanced to make colour printing more affordable and 2000AD slowly transformed into the glossy full colour magazine that it is today, although I flicked through a copy last week and they still print some strips in black and white.

In the late 1980s 2000AD creators Steve Dillon and Brett Ewins put out Deadline, a black and white 'comics and lifestyle’ magazine that covered the indie music scene as well comics. There was a crossover too, William Potter was the bass player in CUD and produced the strip Nommo in Deadline. Many of the creators were from the burgeoning small press scene such as Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett. Their strip Tank Girl would soon become a worldwide sensation. Initially attracted by the pizzazz of Tank Girl I soon came to prefer the less sensational strips such as Hugo Tate by Nick Abadzis. Initially the story of a stick man, the story gradually fleshed him out into a realistic person. It has recently been reissued by Blank Slate and is highly recommended.

Another Deadline strip crying out for a reissue is Phillip Bond’s Wired World. The strip was often likened to Jaime Hernandez’ Locas strips in Love & Rockets as it had two multicultural female lead characters Pippa and Elizabeth, a rarity in comics at the time (still?). It also had a surreal edge similar to early L&R stories, such as in the first issue when Malcolm McLaren wants to make them popstars but they discover he (and several clones of him) are actually unfashionable aliens out to steal their clothes. Please somebody reissue this!

Unlike readers raised on US comics, these black and white strips have been my default and have no doubt influenced my comics reading throughout my whole life. I’m not against colour but unlike Eddie Campbell I wasn’t captivated by ‘strange and wonderful’ American comics, and unlike David I don’t necessarily see colour ‘as a metaphor for the establishment’. In the UK the establishment was black and white (and read all over).

[caption id="attachment_3589" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Wee Eddie Campbell discovers American comics © Eddie Campbell[/caption]

#161 The Yellow Kid and the Non-Original Origin

ernestop — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 14:25:14 +0000

Coulton Waugh’s The Comics (1947) is perhaps the most influential history of comics to date. This landmark work is one of the most-cited histories of comics and seems to be responsible for many of the assumptions that underwrite the majority of the common historical sense of what comics are and where they come from. In his book, Waugh claims that when Outcault’s “The Great Dog Show in M’Googan Avenue” appeared in the New York World on 16 February 1896, “a new form of communication was about to be built” (Walker 2004:12). It is possible the cartoon work of Rodolphe Töpffer's (1799-1846) had not had too much visibility in the United States, but the American Puck Magazine (1871-1918) had been publishing colour cartoons since the 1890s, and the work of cartoonists such as Frederick Burr Opper (1857-1937) already reveals the existence of graphic narratives told in more than one panel. Opper’s "A Real English Outfit in America" is dated 1893, three years before Waugh's proposed birth date for comics. In this page, a story is told in sequential, unframed black and white page panels adapted to the shape of the magazine's page. The text and the graphic images share space on the page and although no caption boxes or dialogue balloons are used, each element is simultaneously recognised as different yet belonging to the same textual unit. [caption id="attachment_3603" align="alignnone" width="299"] Opper’s "A Real English Outfit in America" 1893. Courtesy of the Early Comics Archive.[/caption] Waugh supports his claim that Outcault's strip should be considered the first example of modern comics due to the nearly accidental use of a faster-drying yellow ink on the trademark nightgown worn by "The Yellow Kid" (as the series would become internationally known thereafter) and the popularity that the new bright hue brought to the character and to the newspaper that hosted it. Outcault’s character had appeared for the fist time almost two years before the incident, on June 2, 1894, but it was until colour was added to the series that, according to Waugh and his followers, comics were born. [This view seems frankly US-centric; thanks to Alexi Conman for referring to this 2003 article by Roger Sabin on Ally Sloper]. However, Walker argues that “almost every aspect of Waugh’s tale is a myth” (2004: 7). He explains that in September 1892, The Chicago Inter-Ocean was the first American newspaper to use a high-speed rotary press, almost four years before Charles Saalburg, who was described by Waugh as the “foreman of the New York World’s tint-laying Ben Day machines” (Walker 2004:7), decided to experiment on the Kid’s nightshirt with yellow pigment. It was from 1893 that the Inter-Ocean would start publishing its first colour comics as small inserts, and by the spring of 1894 the Chicago newspaper had introduced a weekly supplement for children titled the Inter-Ocean Jr, and Saalburg himself was responsible for the cover comics series known as The Ting Ling Kids. Furthermore, Walker corrects Waugh and reveals that by 1896 Saalburg “was working for the World as a cartoonist and art director –not as a press foreman.” (2004:7). What is important here is Walker’s claim that an American newspaper was already publishing colour comics as early as 1893, three years before Outcault’s series would reach fame as “The Yellow Kid”, and after the publication of Waugh’s history in 1947, as the official grandfather of (at least) American comics. What seems at least verifiable is that the first appearance of Outcault’s character in the New York World took place on 17 February 1895, as a black and white reprint of a cartoon originally published in Truth magazine (Outcault had started publishing his cartoons featuring the notorious character in said publication in 2 June 1894). The first colour episode appeared on 5 May 1895, and according to Walker the Kid’s nightshirt in it was blue. Walker testifies that the nightshirt was yellow on 24 November 1895, and red with black polka dots on 15 December 1895, before turning yellow permanently on 5 January 1896. Waugh appears to have had his dates wrong, and to have built a whole thesis on a false premise. It is interesting that despite this, Waugh’s book inheritance has been an unavoidable and ubiquitous one: it is taken as an accepted truth that "The Yellow Kid" (which was not even the actual title of the cartoon) was the starting point of American comics because of its (apparently accidental) use of the yellow colour on a “February day of 1896”. [caption id="attachment_3604" align="alignnone" width="497"] Richard F. Outcault, "The Great Dog Show in M'Googan Avenue". The New York World, Sunday February 16 1896. Courtesy of the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library.[/caption] Contrary to this opinion, Walker suggests that Outcault’s cartoon series, Hogan’s Alley, which featured the Yellow Kid, did not introduce the discursive resources or elements that are traditionally understood to synthetise the common minimal elements of comics. Walker points out that Outcault was not the first to use speech balloons, sequential narrative, colour printing, recurring characters, adaptation to other media and product licensing in the form of merchandising. Walker rightly asks: “then why is the Yellow Kid universally regarded as the poster boy for the birth of the comics?” He replies: “The answer lies in the long evolution of the art form and the ultimate convergence of numerous historical trends” (2004: 8). Walker’s answer is not at all discordant with Walter Benjamin's conception of the historicity of the work of art. Richard Fenton Outcault happened to be in the right place at the right time: this does not mean that his Yellow Kid originated the modern conception of comics. In the words of Harvey,

"The Yellow Kid wasn't the first comic strip, American or otherwise [...] However, [it] was the first comics character to demonstrate, beyond all question or quibble, the enormous appeal of the comics. Readers doted on the funnies. So the comics sold newspapers. That phenomenon gave the medium a future because it gave comics a mercantile basis" (Harvey 1998:17).

Harvey's conclusion is important because "the non-original origin" of comics is not attributed to either the creation of a new system of signification with a specific vocabulary (panels in sequence, speech balloons, etc.) or to the printing press and industrialised mechanical reproduction. For Harvey, "The Yellow Kid"... "gave the medium a future" because Outcault's creation had a readership, and because those readers paid for it, and in so doing they were also sponsoring the integral phenomenon of newspaper journalism. The particular setting of late 19th century and early 20th century capitalism allowed the birth of a popular art form that would only be paralleled and eventually succeeded in its mass appeal by film and television. Different technological, cultural, economic and artistic factors were involved in the creation of a new form of graphic communication, resulting from the convergence of industrial development in the form of radical transformations in printing and distribution techniques and also from concordant changes in artistic trends and semiotic codes employed at the time. Comics, or “the comics” as they were known as at first, were born at the very centre of these turbulent times between 1870 and 1900, practically giving a physiognomy to the end of the 19th century and opening the door towards the century to come. The invention of the defining structural elements of the comic strip were the result of technical conditions of production during these technologically-turbulent years, and of the artists' and publishers' experimentation with the resources they had access to. REFERENCES Benjamin, W. (2003). Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940. Jennings, M.W. & H. Eiland (eds.). Cambridge, Mass. & London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Blackbeard, B. (1995). ‘Introduction.’ R. F. Outcault's The Yellow Kid: A Centennial Celebration of the Kid Who Started the Comics. 49. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press. Conman, A. [alexiconman]. (2014, Apr 01). @ernestopriego Interesting! Tho I think even as 'first popular character', Y.K. was preceded in the UK by Ally Sloper http://t.co/J0rgReis32 [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/alexiconman/status/451022931091804160. Accessed 1 April 2014. Couch, C. (2001). ‘The Yellow Kid and the Comic Page’ in Varnum, R. and Gibbons, C.T. (eds.) The Language of Comics. Word and Image. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Dowd, D.B. and Hignite, T. (eds.) (2004). Strips, Toons and Bluesies: Essays in Comics and Culture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Harvey, R. C. (1996). The Art of the Comic Book. An Aesthetic History. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Harvey, R.C. (1998). Children of the Yellow Kid. The Evolution of the American Comic Strip. Seattle: Frye Art Museum. Priego, E. (2013). The Comic Book in the Age of Digital Reproduction. figshare. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.754575. Accessed 1 April 2014. Sabin, R. (2003). "Ally Sloper: The First Comics Superstar?" Image & Narrative, Issue 7. Available at http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/graphicnovel/rogersabin.htm. Accessed 1 April 2014. Walker, B. (2004). The Comics Before 1945. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Waugh, C. (1991) [1947]. The Comics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. License
Please note that though Graphixia has an Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 Canada (CC BY-NC 2.5) License, this post, titled "#161 The Yellow Kid and the Non-Original Origin" by Ernesto Priego has been licensed by its author under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

#162 Alternative Comics in Colour? Imagine That!

pjohnston — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 01:31:33 +0000

Although I’m going to focus on contemporary cartoonists in this post, I’m grateful to be following Ernesto’s piece about The Yellow Kid and colour’s part in the debate surrounding the origins of the form, as its conclusion reminds us of the importance of the “technical conditions of production” which facilitate the creation of a comic. These conditions may or may not facilitate the use of colour, or the use of colour in specific ways for certain reasons, such as Alison Bechdel’s choices of limited palettes. In Fun Home, the sombre grey-green palette lends weight to the funereal tone of the book, whilst in Are You My Mother the washes of crimson emphasise the importance of, and inescapable nature of, blood ties. When asked about the colour choices in interviews, Bechdel has stated that the books were conceived as using only one colour for technical reasons – a condition of production with which she has worked to create comics which use colour to specific ends and with success. But a condition nonetheless, and therefore a constraint.

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home.

Bechdel is a lone cartoonist, as are a notable majority of the successful creators of alternative comics, a term I use here to provide a distinction between it and the mainstream still somewhat dominated by Marvel and DC, following the theories of Charles Hatfield in Alternative Comics and Douglas Wolk in Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Wolk sets out a dichotomy between “mainstream comics” and “art comics,” which he writes “privilege the distinctiveness of the creator’s hand, rather than the pleasures of the tools of genre and readerly expectation.” This auteurism in alternative comics also neatly follows Dave’s post on colour as a metaphor for the establishment. More often than not we associate colour in comics with the cheap, mass-produced comics churned out by the mainstream, produced to deadlines by a team of as many as six or seven people, in contrast to the monochromatic graphic novels produced (in most cases) by a sole auteur which have found acceptance and legitimation and helped to elevate the art form of comics culturally. So it seems there is an expectation that alternative cartoonists, working alone, will work and black and white and that their work will thus carry cultural weight and be intellectual. However, alternative cartoonists do often work in colour or aspire to in spite of the constraints imposed upon them.

Meredith Gran recently set up a page on Patreon, a crowdfunding site which differs from the traditional models of Kickstarter et al in that it asks for funding on an ongoing basis, either per month or per creation. In Gran’s case, patrons (including myself) can choose to pay $1, $2 or $5 a month to support her in drawing her ongoing webcomic Octopus Pie, which has been running on and off since 2007 with the vast majority of its comics utilizing a monochromatic palette and halftone patterns in place of full colour. Patreon also offers “milestone goals” – when the creator reaches a certain monthly amount, a reward can be offered to the patrons. Gran has already passed $1,000 a month, after which the reward is that she can now use the money from Patreon to pay her health insurance, and is up to around $1,500 a month. What’s interesting is that her $3,000 milestone offering reads “if we go this high, I will start posting Octopus Pie pages, 3 times a week, in FULL COLOUR – for the first time ever. Can you imagine? I can’t…just yet.”

Meredith Gran, Octopus Pie

This, I think, is a neat encapsulation of how alternative comics deal with colour – as a slightly mystical thing, to be used if and when the cartoonist can afford to and/or wants to in order to realise their creative vision. The implication in this milestone goal is that, if Gran were given enough money to be able to concentrate solely on Octopus Pie (which, we understand from this, has not been the case thus far) she would choose to work in full colour. What can also be read from this is that working without colour has been largely the result of technical conditions and constraints, but this does not mean that working in black and white has been a lesser process or produced lesser works. Gran has had success working in black and white, but it seems that working in colour has always been something to be aspired to for her. The reason for this are perhaps the subject for another post, but it could be because colour would allow for greater verisimilitude in representation and would add another tool to help her realise the vision she has for characters and their stories, another level of narrative to be used in bringing her version of Brooklyn to life. As a long-time reader and fan, I’ve enjoyed the occasional forays Gran has made into colour, and I hope she reaches the goal.

So colour can be aspired to by alternative cartoonists without it immediately or fully carrying the establishment associations set out by Dave in his post, though this does not mean they are easy to escape. However, we can see from Meredith Gran’s example that there are cases where the lack of colour has been, at least in part if not fully, the result of technical and economic constraints rather than a conscious aesthetic and political choice.

The recent colour reissues of the Scott Pilgrim series, along with Bryan Lee O’Malley’s forthcoming standalone graphic novel Seconds, are also interesting in their use of colour. The original Scott Pilgrim comics were created by O’Malley alone, working as a relatively financially unstable author for the independent Oni Press. He has documented his processes and his career on his Tumblr – in a post responding to a question about “breaking in” to comics, he revealed that he got $1,500 up front for the first Scott Pilgrim book, which took him 6-8 months to write and draw, during which time he worked in a restaurant when the money ran out. Under these conditions it would be incredibly hard work for a lone cartoonist to produce a black and white comic, and impossible to produce one in full colour. As such, it’s unlikely colour was ever even a consideration for O’Malley when conceiving his Scott Pilgrim series.

Bryan Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life (Colour Edition)

However, since the Scott Pilgrim series finished and O’Malley found commercial success (thanks to the series’ exponential growth in popularity and the film adaptation), Oni Press have begun publishing colour editions. These editions are not coloured by O’Malley himself, but instead are coloured by Nathan Fairbarn, who has also coloured Seconds. O’Malley has also given over lettering duties for Seconds to Dustin Harbin, moving the book’s production into a model closer to the mainstream production line than the traditional lone cartoonist toiling in obscurity and financial ruin. Seconds will be in full colour on its initial release, and this is precisely because O’Malley and Oni Press now have the facility to do this because their economic circumstances have changed to allow for this and their conditions of production have expanded.

Some alternative cartoonists and their works still wouldn’t make sense in colour, of course – as Dave points out, it’s impossible to imagine Maus being an effective work in full colour. However, cartoonists must always work with significant constraints which don’t always allow for colour to be a consideration, or more than an aspiration that may or may not be reached some day in the future of their work. If this day does dawn for them, as it has done for Bryan Lee O’Malley, some will choose to work in colour and some won’t, for various reasons, many of which will be related to associations created by colour’s history within the form. Colour has a rich history within the form and can be used in myriad ways to myriad ends, but it must be facilitated by the conditions of the comic’s production first.

#164 (Un)Familiar History: Ed Piskor's Hip Hop Family Tree

wilkinsp — Fri, 25 Apr 2014 17:16:36 +0000

The first thing I thought of when I started reading Ed Piskor's Hip Hop Family Tree was Jonathan Lethem's coming of age novel, The Fortress of Solitude, a novel with which I felt a keen identification, even though its overlap with my life was limited to a few cultural references and the fact that it took place in the mid to late 1970s when I was growing up. In Lethem's novel, Dylan Ebdus is a white kid growing up in the predominantly black neighborhood of Gowanus in Brooklyn. The neighborhood is gentrifying but, at this point, not too quickly. Dylan's best friend is Mingus Rude, a mixed race kid whose father is a coke-addled, semi-famous r&b singer. The two boys share a similar familial situation--each is the only child of a single father--and a love of comics. Fortress of Solitude also refers to the rise of hip hop: "It would be the throwdown of the summer of '77 though it was still the start of July: Grandmaster DJ Flowers is coming with his crew from Flatbush to spin discs in the schoolyard of P.S. 38 after the block party on Bergen" (163). Somehow, I recognized this moment even though I would have had no knowledge of it in 1977. It was like nostalgia for something that I had never experienced.

The familiarity of the references in Lethem's novel--Sugar Hill Records, Rapper’s Delight--is perhaps due to a retrospective reconstruction of personal history through barely conscious cultural associations. The phenomenon is perhaps analogous to that where more people claimed to have been at the Sex Pistols’ 1976 show at the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall than could possibly have been in the audience. I read a lot of pop music publications in my young adulthood, and even though my interests lay in the direction of UK punk and New Wave, something about this parallel movement in the US must have seeped into my consciousness. Punk and hip hop rose around the same time but tended to exist in separate realms, in spite of efforts by the Clash and Blondie to put them together, which Piskor documents in his book.

When I look back, it seems to me now that where Punk was in many ways conservative and retrogressive (though excitingly so!), hip hop was avant garde and revolutionary. In Fortress of Solitude, three white punks laugh when they hear "Rapper's Delight," but their laughter is that of people who are behind the curve. They don't know that they are listening to the future.

Piskor's Hip Hop Family Tree is a comic book history--incorporating panels of future hip hop stars reading X-men to legitimate the connection-- that gives concrete details to the vague recognition of the genre’s beginnings people like me hold. Representing a musical, aural phenomenon in pictures and writing works surprisingly well. In fact, Piskor’s intentional use of a 1970’s pulp comic look has a transporting effect. Far from being a gimmick, it signifies a particular time and place that reminds us how important the visual aspect of the movement was. Piskor says that the urban landscapes of 1970s comics were a particular link between comics and hip hop. Marvel comics of this period in particular featured a gritty New York. And it seems perfectly likely that such a comic book environment should have spawned such mythological figures as Grandmaster Flash, Kool Herc, and Kurtis Blow. By creating alter-ego identities for themselves and battling each other, the early rappers created stories and aesthetics that reconfigured their reality. Afrika Bambaataa, a powerful gang leader, turned his crew to non-violent “battles” of breakdance, beats, and rapping.

And so an urban reality became art: dance, music, and painting. Graffiti artists like Fab Five Freddy and Jean Basquiat were integral parts of what was truly a multimodal movement that deserves a multimodal history.

What’s neat about Hip Hop Family Tree is the way Piskor puts all these pieces together. There are many significant characters here, and they frequently touch each other only tangentially. Piskor does great work to make this the story of a scene rather than of a particular individual, though Russell Simmons, the managerial mastermind behind Kurtis Blow, Run DMC and Def Jam, stands out. The name of the comic tells us everything we need to know about its structure: a family tree is a multimodal visual system like a comic that helps us remember who everyone is by showing them in a particular spatial configuration. Consequently, Piskor constructs Hip Hop Family Tree more as a series of visual tableaux, somewhat like flash cards, than as strictly sequential panels that tell a forward-moving narrative. In no way does this presentation diminish Piskor's project, which is to fix the origins of hip hop in our memory. Hip Hop Family Tree is the first comic that I have read to present cultural history in this way, so I was struck by the freshness of Piskor's structural approach and the way he builds his representation of the scene.

Piskor is especially good at portraying the difficulties of translating hip hop into the world of conventional pop music recording. DJs like Grandmaster Flash used other people’s records in their shows which he couldn’t put on his own records. So the first disc Grandmaster Flash put out did not actually feature him at all.

Thus Piskor shows how integrating hip hop with the record industry meant the rise of the MC or rapper, initially an add-on to the DJ’s show, and the diminishment of the DJ. Rather than simply being a love letter to hip hop, Piskor’s comic strikes me as a legitimate history that charts the subtleties of its transformation. Hip Hop Family Tree is a tonic to the notion that comics simplify, in a bad way, what they represent.

Ultimately, Hip Hop Family Tree made me understand what I identified with in Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude: the extent to which my memory depends on my mediated experience of the popular American pop-cultural forms of the 1970s. It took me a while to bite the bullet and buy Hip Hop Family tree because I didn't think it was "for me," but it turned out to be the opposite. This is a book for anyone who interested in a detailed history of an incredibly creative period and the larger than life geniuses who made it that way.

Works Cited

Lethem, Jonathan. The Fortress of Solitude. New York: Vintage, 2004.

Piskor, Ed. Hip Hop Family Tree. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2013.

#165 We're Punk, Not Junk

admin — Tue, 06 May 2014 04:10:03 +0000

Nope, yr junk. Plain and simple. I, for one, am all for the margins. And not the margins that reflect a deep immersion in the histories, narratives, and mythology of comics and their production, but the margins that seek to impose themselves on the rigid, contrived, penis-oriented nerd-centred hierarchies of comics histories, narratives, and mythologies. I’m interested in the margins that seek to provoke, up-end, insult the integrity of the burgeoning comics canon. To this end, I’ve been getting antsy about what I see as an increasing shift in comics toward the mainstream, especially in the academy. Intellectual conversations around comics are circulating widely through the hallways, onto introductory course syllabi, and comics scholarship is right out there with other trendy approaches like digital humanities. We’re all busily finding a place for comics in the cultural conversation, seeking to justify, explain, generally demystify what we see as an art form. Comics “scholars” (as if that isn’t the grandest of oxymorons–right up there with Heavy Metal scholars and sociologists) would do well to remember Joe Strummer: “Authority is supposedly grounded in wisdom, but I could see from a very early age that authority was only a system of control and it didn’t have any inherent wisdom. I quickly realized that you either became a power or you were crushed.” Or, if you prefer a notable quotable closer to home, how about Walt Kelly, through Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Whenever I get antsy about anything, I return to punk music. The music itself, and the philosophy behind it. The title of this missive comes from a newspaper headline in which “punks” were upset that they had been unduly picked upon by police for inciting a riot. It’s an old headline and notable only because I raged about it at the time. I raged because the whole principle of being punk is that you are junk–that’s your only power. You reject acceptance in favour of the margins. You support only chaos and loudness. You break consciously away from anything that might suggest legitimacy. Above all, you don’t whine about being junk–you relish it. Comics and the conversations around them would do well to be conscious of the medium’s parallel trajectory to music, particularly music on the margins. I don’t think comics relish their disposability anymore, and I think the academic conversations around comics and their increasing visibility in academic contexts has something to do with this sense of permanence creeping into comics production. Everyday it seems there’s a new comic that represents our current cultural situation better than ever–that stands as a marker for who we are and where we might be going–like Sex Criminals, say. My point is this: is anyone just reading comics anymore? Or have they been permanently remediated as a valuable form of cultural production. There’s all sorts of similar narratives trajectories in music: rap / gansta rap / rock’n’roll / punk / emo / all onceoccupied the margins, represented the margins, but now seem a permanent fixture in the cultural conversation–when yr mother is singing Jay-Z, is it really cultural critique–was it ever–does that matter? I don’t think comics should concern themselves with their viability. I think comics should be disposable, and we would do well to treat them as such. They can have value as something disposable–they always have. The difference is that returning to a disposable comics culture would bring things more in line with that other casualty of the digital age: the mixed tape. http://youtu.be/zu1V3R-Jpwo The exchange among peers of cassette tapes, with their scrawled ledgers listing tunes has disappeared into the regulated and formalized world of Rdio playlists, iTunes geniuses, and the like. Getting a friend’s mixed tape was a way of connecting, and disconnecting, from the community; we didn’t have to like it, we didn’t have to commit, we could damn well throw it out. Unfortunately, we’re far too busy making our own mixed tapes and not really participating any longer in the politics of exchange and disposability that makes comics–and good, emerging music–different, marginal. Comics and the narratives around them have turned all Prog. Rock: King Crimson sweeping narratives, endless in scope and twisting, turning in virtuoso performance rather than catchy disposable summer hits we all remember. We’re all critique and “genius” without any real sense of what the implications of such discourses might be or the utter boredom of the ritual itself (what’s the sound of 10,000 comicbook nerds wanking: a Rush concert). In closing, let’s crank it up; rev up the chainsaw and blow everything we’re doing up. Let’s think less about justifying, close reading, and establishing legitimacy or a canon and think more about a disposable making mixed tapes that mark particular junctures in the life of a critical bell curve. Let’s make sure that the critical conversations we have about comics are as disposable and unnecessary as the medium itself. Stop shoving comics where they don’t belong; you might ruin them. And most of all, stop whining about how comics are not junk; they’re junk–that’s what makes them so fucking awesome.

#166 What about Batman!: Take Your Juxtaposed Pictorial and Other Images in Deliberate Sequence and Shove Them

Grayb — Tue, 13 May 2014 17:13:05 +0000

Do you remember that scene in Understanding Comics where Scott McCloud is trying to define comics, and he's up on stage and someone in the audience keeps calling out names of superheroes until he is forcibly removed? And hahahahaha [knowing glance to other "comics scholars" in the room] who was that idiot anyway? I'm beginning to think I'm that idiot.

The definition that McCloud comes up with here makes me want to punch myself in the face for two reasons. One, it smacks of a desperate need to be taken seriously (juxtaposed pictorial and other images ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?); and two, it means almost nothing to me. Doesn't basically everything in the history of the world either convey information or produce an aesthetic response? Especially if it can be either a pictorial or "other" image? And who determines whether it's deliberate? I'm pretty sure this definition covers everything I've ever seen with my eyeballs.

I'd rather hang out with the dude who likes Batman and got kicked out of this imaginary conference than with the people nodding sagely along with this non-definition. (And yes, I know McCloud revisits this definition again in Reinventing Comics and acknowledges some of the problems with it, but for now I'm talking about this particular scene so bear with me.) I feel like when I got into comics, we were all the Batman guys, and as the years pass and we grow up and we all yearn to be taken seriously by the academy, we recognize that there's no space for the Batman guy at the party anymore, and lest anyone figure out we used to be like him, we turn on him and kick him out. Because LOL SUPERHEROES, am I right?

In my scholarly life, I'm trying to assemble a comprehensive history of Canadian comics, and even though the world of English-Canadian comics especially is basically a massive anti-commercial indie hipster circle jerk at the moment, it wouldn't exist at all without its own frivolous superheroic history of Johnny Canuck and Nelvana of the North. These were largely terrible comics, but they were where people learned how to comic, and those skills and that heritage weren't lost; they just, in the words of the great Calvin and Hobbes, transmogrified.

Why so much anxiety about this part of our collective history?

I prefer basically all the other definitions McCloud greys out there, but I especially like number four: "Corruptor of Our Nation's Youth." At least that gave us something interesting to rally around. I'd much rather devote my professional life to studying the corruptor of our nation's youth than to studying juxtaposed pictorial or other images in deliberate sequence.

We take ourselves too seriously at our peril.

I suppose I've imported the person I was/am as a literary scholar to the world of comics: in my literary life, I study the popular press and try to figure out why it is successful. I love pop. I love bubble gum. I love comics. I guess this comes down to the fact that I am far more interested in what is popular and why it's popular than I am in lofty and worthy conversations about a medium that is supposed to be fun. Yeah, that's right, I said it. I think comics should be fun. Maus is tragic and heartbreaking, but it's also funny and infuriating. Tangles is painful and difficult, but it's also whimsical and lovely. I don't think we sell out the artistic or literary merit of any comic to acknowledge that it's something more than a series of juxtaposed pictorial or other images in deliberate sequence.

I don't care that some really dense people don't take comics seriously. They probably also don't take television seriously; that is equally dumb. What people consume matters. When we dismiss any of it out of hand, we lose an opportunity to make a little more sense of the world. Not an idealized corner of the world, but the actual media landscape as it is really consumed by real people who spend their real money on really content. Those are the people who matter to the future of comics, way more than us ivory tower dorks, and we should pay attention to what they read and like and are.

To the extent that this is my mini-manifesto, I will always be the one yelling, "What about Batman!" in the rooms full of serious-minded comics scholars that grow ever more crowded.

You might ask, "Why aren't we taken seriously?"

I will respond, "What about Batman!"

You might ask, "How do we establish Research Chairs in Comics Studies?"

I will respond, "What about Batman!"

You might ask, "Wasn't this post supposed to be about Comics and Music?"

I will respond, "Batman! Batman! Batman!"

#167 Conferences and Conventions: Finding Purchase through the Popular

smarsden — Tue, 20 May 2014 05:51:10 +0000

Brenna is, as ever, completely correct – we do tend to take ourselves far too seriously in the academy concerning our treatment of comics studies. As in any field, there is a tendency to create an ostracizing language that defines the discipline and marginalizes those who refuse to learn its complex vocabularies as we tend to fixate on the boutique, niche market, “literary” aspects (and titles) of the medium. We do this for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that our training in English literature forces us to do so – this is how we were brought up, so to speak, in classes devoted to continental literary theory, obscure poetry of undefined periods, and postcolonial studies attempting to recontextualize under-read texts. It is through these means that English scholars today, judging by the self-reflexive pieces consistently offered in PMLA (even in its most recent issue), are fixated on justifying the existence of the discipline as a whole even while stating that this is the opposite of what they are doing. It is little wonder that, in establishing comics as a relatively new field and offshoot of the larger canon, that we employ the same knee-jerk reactions that limit our engagement with more popular works. In order to be validated, there appears to be a need to have comics studies emulate its parent field.

In order to rethink this self-defeating paradigm, we have to address what drew us to comics as a field of study on its own in the first place – proliferation, popularity and entertainment. To do this, we might look at the way that the general public engages with the medium. Having recently attended an academic conference during the same week that I attended a comic book convention, FanExpo Vancouver, I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by the vast differences in the audiences at each event. As well I should be, you might say, as they’re designed for different purposes, no? The academic conference is, ostensibly anyway, a gathering of individuals in celebration of their field, listening to panels of experts discussing recent trends and current research, meeting celebrated authors who will speak to the crowds, and then very likely a vendors’ section marketing products to attendees. Problem is, the academic conference is also work – the peripheral talk surrounds the decline of the discipline, the lack of positions for new PhDs, cuts to funding and the need to rethink traditions. And very few attendees are present without the benefit of a PD fund or other form of stipend that allows them to be there.

It turns out that the purpose of the comic convention is very similar to the academic conference in terms of its raison d’être, though it is lacking a focus on the “professional” study of comics. The comic convention is not work at all – it celebrates the medium with a joyful revelry that is unbiased and unfettered by any concerns about the supposed decline of the Arts. Turn here to see all of the positive attributes that the academic conference is supposed to hold with none of its drawbacks or posturing. Celebrity panels of authors and illustrators are listened to with rapt attention and lively engagement, signings and photo ops are in abundance, new trends in comics’ publication are brought up for their positive potential and not in fear of the transitions that lay on the horizon. Lineups to attend, at least at FanExpo, are often hours long with enthusiasm never waning. Tickets, as with the academic conference, can be costly, though attendees do not begrudge paying them even though they are certainly not being funded by an institution. Ages range from the very young to the far more seasoned fan, and it is difficult to imagine a more inclusive event.

This enthusiasm is most evident in the costume roleplaying, or cosplay, that many fans participate in. Creation of these costumes is a detailed and time consuming process, with many of the audience members taking weeks or even months to mold and sculpt their favorite character’s suits in homage – some of those I interviewed when I attended stated that they dress up every year for the event. Some are flamboyant, others revealing, and others very understated so as to only catch the eye of other fans of a particular title. Like many other parents who attended with children, I dressed my one year old up for the occasion, first as Spider-Man then as Superman. The atmosphere around cosplayers and those taking photos of them was vibrant and exciting, with both viewer and viewed flaunting their love of comics through the process of recording the event in images. Not only is there joy in the attendance, but a sense of pride regarding their level of involvement.

Why is the convention so much more successful than the conference? Why is it filled with the elation that the academy should have but doesn’t? The short answer is that it doesn’t deny the public a reason to attend – invited guests and celebrities of the event are both popular and niche, with no limitations on which comic should be present. The artists’ alley houses many from the big two publishers, though they also include those who work entirely on zines and publish independently. Authors are similarly represented, including novelists as well as comics’ writers, with no one privileged over the other. The convention does not deny the reason that people engage with comics, sometimes – perhaps often – purely for entertainment’s sake. Instead, it revels in the success of the medium in every way possible.

Is this not what we should be doing with comics studies, and truly with the study of English on the whole? In my very first experience as a TA, I was begrudgingly tasked with teaching Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to a class of first year students. To this day, I have never seen a more engaged and proactive class, despite the objectives being exactly the same in every 100 level lit class I’ve taught since: critical thinking, close reading and discovering intertextuality. We can have none of these if we don’t foster engagement first. What would a conference look like if we did not deny the authors that the general populace actively enjoyed reading en masse? What if, instead, we turned to these authors first in our study of the changing nature of the discipline? There is a tendency, and almost an expectation, to differentiate the study of literature from the reading of books, to define literature as something necessarily outside of the popular – many with whom I’ve spoken martyr themselves solely on Thackeray, Fielding or Joyce, and if they read Cussler, Clancy or King, they certainly don’t discuss it.

With comics, we have the potential to reinterpret the insular nature of the academic approach that often refuses to accept the popular often solely because it is popular. If we are to grow as a field, it will be through latching on to what inspires larger audiences and drives them to read, not by immediately excluding this potential because of the formulaic approaches to literature that have become so deeply ingrained that we often fail to notice them. The academy thrives best when it concentrates on what is relevant in an accessible and inviting manner. Posturing in comics studies will only serve to replicate the same anxieties that scholars of traditional literature feel today. While conferences may not mirror conventions in the near future, organizers clearly could find some inspiration in the success of this inclusivity. Writ larger, we need to be aware that applying the academic logic of limitation on a fledgling field of study will only serve to narrow the doorway for those who may wish to devote themselves to study the discipline in future generations. “Where is Batman?” is a question we should consistently be asking indeed.

#168 Québécois Comics That I Think You Should Read. Right Now!

hattiek — Tue, 27 May 2014 23:53:30 +0000

I take my position on Graphixia as the resident Quebec Comics Monkey rather seriously, so today I am going to take my chance to give you a list of my top Québécois comics that I think you should go and hunt down to read… right this very second if at all possible. I sometimes worry that I do Québécois comics an injustice. I often find myself at conferences angling for the cheap laugh by drawing attention to Quebec’s rip off of Asterix and Obelix (his name is Bojoual, it’s a little bit racist and quite a lot rubbish), or making fun of the inimitable Capitaine Kebec. Yet despite this I genuinely do think that some of the Québécois comics I have read both for fun and whilst doing my research are some of the most exciting, innovative or just plain lovely books I have ever read.* I’m not going to include Julie Doucet and Guy Delisle on this list because you’ve probably already read some of their books but I am going to include some names I have spoken about previously on the site because I am a woman obsessed. Jimmy Beaulieu – Suddenly Something Happened

Beaulieu is the founder of the publishing house Mecanique Generale as well as a comic book artist and this book is my favourite of all of his works. It tells the stories of how he came from Rural Quebec to live and work in Montreal and is a beautiful musing in living, working and loving in the city. His short section that focuses on the balconies of Montreal made me so homesick for living there that I had to put the book in the freezer and have a big cry.

Michel Rabagliati – Paul Joins the Scouts

I’ve spoken at length before about just how wonderful Michel Rabagliati’s semi-autobiographical comics are. This latest one in the series is no exception. On the surface a story about Paul’s childhood adventures when he joins the Scouts, this is really a moving tale of friendship, loss and the people that make an indelible impression on our lives. Rabagliati’s books just keep getting better and better and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Sylvain Lemay, Andre St Georges – Pour en finir avec novembre

The story of four friends who are inspired by the events of the October Crisis in 1970 and so they make a series of choices that change their lives irrevocably. I thoroughly enjoyed this attempt to address some of the most divisive events in Quebec’s history in comic book form. Engaging and honestly written this is well worth checking out if you can find it.

Simon Bossé et Eric Simon – Hamidou Diop

Hubert Aquin’s Prochain Episode is one of my favourite books, of all time, ever, and this comic which explores what happened to the enigmatic character of Hamidou Diop after the novel ended is gloriously inventive and playful enough to do justice to the original text. Single page panels give the story a brilliantly laid back pace and the sparse artwork and explanatory text make this something between a Comic and an Emblem Book. Unfortunately this hasn’t yet been translated into English, but if you’re a fan of Aquin’s novel and can read French then do seek it out.

Pascal Blanchet – White Rapids

Pascal Blanchet’s books are just downright beautiful. I wrote for this blog previously about how he uses music to wonderful effect but right here I would like to focus on this book. White Rapids tells the story of the northern Quebec town which was founded by the Shawningen Water and Power company for their employees. Beautifully created images perfectly convey the lives of its residents and their ultimate dismay as the town is abruptly shut down in the 1970s. What are you even waiting for? Go on… order it!

Luc Giard – Le Pont du Havre

I’ve read this book a few times now and every time I reread it I come away having found something else to mull over, I love this about it. Whilst it is most definitely a comic book, at times it feels like you are reading a poem. While his artwork can seem scratchy and sketchy at the beginning it bears a closer look and Giard uses visual references to other artists and repetition to brilliant effect. As the book draws to a close he begins to introduce colour to his panels and this shift in visual tone works to unsettle the reader and cause them to rethink their perception of the rest of the book.

So, there you go, six comics that I think you should read that you might not have heard of. Let me know if you have read or do read any of them, I would love to know what you think! *For the purposes of clarity I have chosen works by artists from the province of Quebec. The works were originally published in French. Most of them are now available in English.

#169 You Can Tell Stories With Music Too

damon — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 20:17:31 +0000

A small corner of the internet got very excited last week when writer Gabe Soria (Life Sucks) posted an entry titled ‘Historia de la Musica Rock: Locas’ to his tumblr. Among the many tweeters linking to the post was Nick Abadzis, artist on The Cigar That Fell In Love With A Pipe. Doing a great service to humankind, Soria has trawled through the first volume of Jaime Hernandez’ Locas stories and noted down any song mentioned and compiled them into a playlist. That’s 704 pages from the first 50 issues of Love & Rockets. He’s not even the first person to attempt this, in 2006 Robert Boyd listed all the songs he could find in both Jaime & Gilbert’s work. However, Soria actually compiled all the songs into a downloadable file, not that I would ever condone such a thing *ahem*

[caption id="attachment_3729" align="aligncenter" width="600"] A mention of X-Ray Spex in Love & Rockets Volume 1 issue 33 © Jaime Hernandez[/caption] It’s an impressive list, featuring bands that you would expect such as Black Flag (although I would have sworn they would have had more than one song mentioned) and X-Ray Spex that soundtrack Maggie’s adolescence, as well as Lou Christie and the Allman Brothers Band. The latter acts were both covered by Hopey’s band. Famously, Hopey misheard the lyrics of Christie’s Two Faces Have I and it becomes a running joke. Years later when Izzy bumps into Terry playing a solo gig she heckles from the audience ‘play Do Vases Have Eyes’. [caption id="attachment_3731" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Hopey mishears a song title in Love & Rockets Volume 1 issue 18 © Jaime Hernandez[/caption] Country, rock, easy listening, punk, new wave, hip hop and even TV theme tunes are included. The playlist is a wonderful way to enter into the cartoonist’s mind and the list betrays the many musical influences in Jaime Hernandez’ life. In the Art of Jaime Hernandez, Todd Hignite noted how important Jaime’s mother Aurora was in his formative musical world (as well as so much else for Los Bros). At home Aurora would listen to the local pop radio as well traditional Mexican music. Later Jaime would be influenced by the hard rock and glam tastes of his older brothers but then punk broke and it changed the lives of Los Bros Hernandez. For a while Gilbert and Jaime played in garage bands Beer Gut and Suspicion but they decided being cartoonists was the career for them. Their younger brother Ismael pursued music more seriously becoming the bassist in Nardcore band Dr Know. All these influences show up in Jaime’s stories. The likes of Spotify and YouTube mean it is now easy for artists (or fans) to create playlists to promote their work or to reveal influences. Hattie compiled the discography from Pascal Blanchet’s graphic novel Nocturne into a playlist for an earlier Graphixia post. Pop culture blog largehearted boy regularly posts playlists by authors they have interviewed including Geneviève Castrée on the release of her book Susceptible. EDIT: Gabe Soria also has a playlist on largehearted boy for Life Sucks. Castrée described how personal compiling the mix was ‘It is nearly impossible for me to make a playlist inspired by Susceptible without turning it into some kind of soundtrack to my life’. [caption id="attachment_3732" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Goglu's mother confuses Sonic Youth and Pink Floyd in Susceptible © Geneviève Castrée[/caption]

Susceptible detailed Castrée’s life up to the age of 18 when she left home and the playlist is like a DVD extra that fills in some background to the story. In her teens she starts experimenting with drugs and hanging out with punks, she discovers the Dead Kennedys, CRASS, and Iggy and the Stooges as well as Sonic Youth, The Raincoats and Stereolab. Bands that would later inspire her to make her own music.

[caption id="attachment_3733" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Geneviève Castrée performs as Woelv. Photo by Liam Butler from K records website.[/caption]

Indeed, like Los Bros, Castrée also plays music but she has managed to successfully intertwine it with being a cartoonist. In fact, she did not start making music until after she was making comics. In an interview with The Comics Journal Castrée describes how when she came to make Pamplemoussi, for Montreal based publishers L'Oie de Cravan, she wanted it to also contain music. However, she had to learn from scratch how to make the music she wanted ‘I don’t want anyone else to write the music, I’m going to do it. So I kind of had to teach myself how to make notes with the guitar’. Castrée has gone on to make music under the name Woelv (the album Tout Seul dans la Forêt en Plein Jour, Avez-Vous Peur? also came with a book) and she currently records as Ô Paon. If you like droney, slightly folky music with singing in French then check it out, it’s great!

Reading about Soria’s Locas playlist immediately made me think of the mix that Blank Slate Books released when they published the collected edition of Hugo Tate by Nick Abadzis (author of the acclaimed Laika) in 2012. I briefly mentioned Hugo Tate, which has a quote from The Comics Journal on the front cover comparing it to Love & Rockets, when I was discussing Deadline last time out. Like Hernandez there are TV and film theme tunes (as well as incidental pieces) amongst the music, and like Castrée there is room for Iggy and the Stooges. I got in touch with Abadzis to ask him about the mix.

[caption id="attachment_3737" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Cover for the Hugo Tate playlist © Nick Abadzis[/caption]

He reminded me that an early version of the playlist turns up as a mixtape in the book in the strip Ancient History. When Hugo leaves for America he sends his friend Jason a cassette filled with music they both like (you know, when mixtapes actually were on tape!). Jason is confused as it is all music he already owns. According to Abadzis, Hugo knew that but he was ‘trying to tell his friend how much he liked him and that he was going to miss listening to those songs with him’. This highlights an important social aspect of mixtapes and playlists especially in the past when they would be handed to someone on a physical format to play rather than streamed on a website. As Abadzis puts it ‘making an artifact to give to someone, a little box that contains sounds you love’. A mixtape might be used to woo someone, or just to say that you enjoyed their company, ‘If I ever gave you a tape or burned you a CD, I must've liked you’.

[caption id="attachment_3734" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Detail from Hugo Tate - Ancient History © Nick Abadzis[/caption]

The tracks on the Hugo Tate mix are all songs that Abadzis loves but he compiled them from Hugo’s mid 90s point of view. With music from the past there is always an element of time travel involved, I can’t hear The The’s Uncertain Smile without being transported back to 1988 and walking around with my headphones on. I asked Abadzis if, like Los Bros and Castrée, he had ever been a musician but he explained that despite being from a musical family and having lessons as a kid he had ‘lapsed’. However music is obviously very important to him and he mentioned that being a DJ might have been a viable option if cartooning hadn’t worked out.

With such a true-to-life feeling to the storytelling in Hugo Tate I asked Abadzis how autobiographical it was. He explained that there were elements of his life in the story, and his younger self in Hugo but this was ‘the process of fiction at work’. Reading Ancient History again after chatting to Abadzis, I can see elements of him in other characters too. Jason talks about getting some decks and being a DJ despite Stan trying to get him to join a band. He is also open minded about music and excited to ‘dig around the Record and Tape Exchange, unearth forgotten gems.’ I actually worked in Record and Tape in the late 1990s, I know just how much digging he would have to do.

[caption id="attachment_3735" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Detail from Hugo Tate - Ancient History © Nick Abadzis[/caption]

Ancient History is dedicated to the friends that Abadzis used to exchange mixtapes with and is actually a love letter to friendship and to the lost art of recording a physical mixtape. Compiling a digital playlist just doesn’t have the same emotional connection, especially for us folks of a certain vintage. It also highlights the importance of music in many of our lives. Ruminating on his potential alternative career as a DJ, Abadzis noted that comics are only one kind of storytelling medium - ‘You can tell stories with music too’

#170 On Comic Books as Expressive Objects: Notes on the Undergrounds and All that Jazz

ernestop — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 17:08:03 +0000

With thanks to Damon Herd whose latest Graphixia post on music ("#169 You Can Tell Stories With Music Too") made me unearth and update these notes.

Charles Hatfield points out in his Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (2005), that the format and vocabulary of comic books was very consciously appropriated and turned upside-down by underground cartoonists such as Robert Crumb, Harvey Kurtzman, Gilbert Shelton and Spain Rodriguez, who used the recognisable material traits of the superhero comics to deal with subjects that were too “dangerous” for the Comics Book Authority, children or merely mainstream culture. According to Hatfield, the undergrounds “transformed an object that was jejune and mechanical in origin into a radically new kind of expressive object” (2005:7). I feel one needs to emphasise that this does not mean that the authors publishing their work through the established channels had not done something similar with the format decades earlier. The comic book as a specific physical product (the paper, the flexible spine, the staples, the size and shape, the number of pages) was essentially “an expressive object;” and it was the tired, endlessly censored conventions of the mainstream comic book that the undergrounds redefined in unprecedented ways. The differences between syndicated newspaper comic strips that appealed to children and adults alike (Charles Schulz's Peanuts, started in 1950), comic books dealing with serious topics (like Jack Cole's True Crime Comics which started in 1947 and dealt with drug addiction) and comic magazines (like Harvey Kurtzman's MAD, which started in 1952) were well defined in the publishing market. Kurtzman's seminal work for MAD and William Gaines's EC Comics of the 1950s were themselves the conflation of different aesthetics that would cause scandal and massive censorship. Kurtzman's graphic style and profound sense of artistic rebellion was later imitated by underground cartoonists. [caption id="attachment_3772" align="aligncenter" width="187"] The cover of the first issue of MAD Magazine; artwork by Harvey Kurtzman, (October 1952).[/caption] Their presence in the cultural landscape coincided with important artistic events such as the first draft of Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1952). Kerouac's novel has jazz music as its “binding component” (Elborough 2008: 101), and it could be argued that the whole beat literary movement would not have taken place without the appearance of jazz music long-playing records circa 1951, which played at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute, and substituted the more limited 78-rpm records that previously were the only available form of recorded jazz (the 7-inch 45 rpm record was introduced by RCA in 1949). According to jazz critic Whitney Balliet, “by destroying the arbitrary time limitations of 78-rpm recordings” the LP record “suddenly encouraged any number of new musical approaches simply by making room for them” ("The Sound of Surprise". 1959, in Elborough 2008:100; Balliet 2001). The “automatic writing” of the Beat writers was not only an aesthetic move, it was the expression of the conflation of the technologies available at the time, such as the typewriter, the record player, and, it should be added, synthetic drugs, which imposed a new tempo by enabling different speeds at which to write, listen to music and experience “reality.” Kerouac famously wrote On the Road on three weeks with a typewriter on a continuous roll of paper (“foot-long tele-type paper”). Interviewed in 1959 by Steve Allen in his TV show, he explained: “If I write narrative novels, I don't want to change my narrative thought: I keep going...” (Antonelli 1985). [caption id="attachment_3755" align="aligncenter" width="357"] An autobiographical page by Robert Crumb about record collecting.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_3757" align="aligncenter" width="313"] "Stories about record collecting and working:"
Robert Crumb (art) and Harvey Pekar (writing), cover for American Splendor No. 4. (1979).[/caption] Until recently, considerable number of pages of comics scholarship took for granted that comic books were codex, stapled publications. The pysical dimensions, type of paper, conditions of reproduction and distribution (as well as the authors' conditions of existence and their employers' and publishers' demands) played a key role in determining the type of stories produced (including length). Like the 78-rpm and LP records in the case of jazz and blues, the 7-inch single in the case of pop and punk music and the 12-inch single for dance music, the object itself (the comic book) determined the expression it contained (the comic). The term "expressive object" is therefore a complex construct referring not only to a thing, but to a meaningful thing that is not only text, but always-already complex context. The influence of the Beat Generation on the work of underground cartoonists is well documented , as is their preference for jazz music recorded on vinyl (Zwigoff 1994; Springer Berman 2003). Xerox manufactured the first photocopier in 1949, and by the mid 1960's they were in all American offices; by the 1970's the local copy shop was an institution and by the 1980's “truly affordable high-quality reproduction was in full bloom.” (Dowd 2004:24). The emergence of an underground comic book movement was inserted within this cultural matrix that combined the popularisation of the photocopying machine, the widespread production and distribution of LP records and the larger public awareness of pop culture and mass media as agents of social change. The appearance of the first book printed with photocomposition in 1953 was as liberating for the book industry as the appearance of the LP album was for musicians, writers and actors (it was in 1950 that Argo set up to record Shakespeare's complete works on LP albums). These new technologies of reproduction had profound consequences on the material that was produced, which included the increased availability of photocopying machines in university campuses throughout the United States at a time of political and artistic unrest. [caption id="attachment_3758" align="aligncenter" width="272"] One of Robert Crumb's most famous comics is actually not a comic book,
but the cover artwork for a rock and roll LP album (1968).[/caption] In 2009 bookshops in the UK were receiving The Beats. A Graphic History (2009) written by 1970's underground comic book legend Harvey Pekar and illustrated by various artists and printed in black and white^.It is well-known that Robert Crumb is a collector of 78-rpm records (Zwigoff, 1994). In his “Robert Crumb's Depression's Graph” (2005), Crumb himself identifies his interest in 78 records as a relevant biographical point in his life. Other famous cartoonists who are well-known vinyl record collectors of musical genres such as blues, jazz, bluegrass and Americana are Pekar, Clowes and Ware. (I remember fondly visiting Dan and Erika Clowes' home in 2001 and marveling at his carefully curated record collection). Psychologists, musicologists and some social scientists have written about the social and psychological functions of (and reasons to listen to) music and its influence on other cultural practices, but the case of comics and music remains largely unexplored in recent comics studies (how music is represented in comics is a different question, see Brown 2013 for interesting insights). As Dowd points out, one of the outstanding characteristics of the underground comic book movement was “a founding imperative for self-publishing in comics that represents a break with standard method of production” (Dowd 2004:20-21). Self-publishing has been a well-established mode of production of illustrated magazines and books. Conservative American critics of the comic book medium in the 1950s such as Gilbert Seldes, attempted to disconnect comic books from “the dime novel of fifty years ago.” According to Seldes, “the dime novel was a printed text, sparsely illustrated, if at all, and therefore had to be read.” (1956:91). Seldes assumed that comic books were not “read,” in spite of the fact he constantly refers to “comic book readers.” A conservative cultural ritic who vocally opposed to comics, Seldes was paradoxically one of the earliest commentators of the form: by 1924 he had written an essay on 'Krazy Kat', including comics in his Seven Lively Arts (1962). At the time, the established processes of comic book production were so rigid that self-publishing was a liberating practice that put the control of the artistic creation back in the hands of the author, rather than the publishing house. Unlike the mainstream comics of the 1950s, underground comix were distributed through “specialised shops”, which in 1960s America meant “head shops,” where they were sold next to drug and rock and roll paraphernalia . The materiality of the comic book as publication (in many cases almost completely controlled by the author) was extended and modified by the emergence of new channels of distribution, which included common spaces for different cultural practices such as poetry readings, political meetings and small concerts. Robert Crumb, the leading figure of the American underground comics movement, personally folded, stapled and sold copies of Zap Comix No. 0 on the streets of San Francisco in 1967 (Rosenkranz 2002; Danky and Kitchen 2009). Harvey Kurtzman's aesthetic legacy could be felt from the cover itself and it is now one of the most valuable and sought-after comic books. [caption id="attachment_3761" align="aligncenter" width="425"] A copy of Zap Comix 0, 1967, graded in "Good" condition. Via CGC Comics.[/caption] A mint condition copy of 1967's Zap Comix No. 0 remains impossible to find (and if it existed it would most likely be unaffordable by regular salaried human beings). Underground comics were read, shared, exchanged, and treasured because of all that. They were not, at the time, preserved unread for posterity. The fragility of the stapled comic book seems inversely proportional to the obsessive behaviour of cartoonists as record collectors (and of comic book readers as collectors of anything). The collector and the historian are often concerned with preserving what is not only valuable but in danger of disappearing. The collector (and I suppose the historian as well) does not only accumulates objects ("things"), but recognises in them their meaning and provides them with new ones. The contradictory pulsions of destruction/preservation seem to find reverberations in the relationships between physical formats and contraints and creative expression. References Antonelli, J. (dir.) (1985) Kerouac. The Movie. Daybreak Films. Balliet, W. (2001. Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz, 1954-2000. London: Granta. Brown, K.M. (2013) Musical Sequences in Comics. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship 3(1):9, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/cg.aj Danky, J., with D. Kitchen. (2009) Underground Classics. The Transformation of Comics into Comix . New York: Abrams ComicArts and the Chazen Museum of Art. Dowd, D.B. and Hignite, T. (eds.) (2004) Strips, Toons and Bluesies: Essays in Comics and Culture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Elborough, T. (2008) The Long-Player Goodbye. The Album from Vinyl to iPod and Back Again. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Hatfield, C. (2005) Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Pekar, H., Piskor, E. and Buhle, P. (2009) The Beats. A Graphic History. New York: FSG Adult. Priego, E. (2013) The Comic Book in the Age of Digital Reproduction. figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.754575. Rosenkranz, P. (2002) Rebel Visions: the Underground Comix Revolution, 1963-1975. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books. Seldes, G. (1956) The Public Arts. New York: Simon & Schuster. Seldes, G. (1962) The Seven Lively Arts. New York: A.S. Barnes. Schäffer, T. et al (2013) "The psychological functions of music listening." Frontiers in Psychology. 2013; 4: 511. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00511. Zwigoff. T. (producer, director) (1994) Crumb. [film] Sony Pictures Classics.

#171 Not Just A Phase: Music, Fandom and Visual Devices in Alec Longstreth’s “Weezer Fan” Comics

pjohnston — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 00:29:43 +0000

So far this series of posts on comics and music has confirmed that there are no shortage of comics either about music or featuring music as an important, integral element of their narrative, particularly in the spheres of alternative or indie comics. I’ve always held music and comics in a similar space in my brain, and have discovered many cartoonists through musicians and vice versa, which has created the bubbling thought in the back of my mind that there is a very real synergy between music and comics, and that it’s a synergy that’s more unique than we tend to give it credit for, though many scholars have looked into it with intriguing results. Peter Wilkins acknowledged this in his excellent piece on Ed Piskor’s Hip Hop Family Tree, when he wrote that “representing a musical, aural phenomenon in pictures and writing works surprisingly well,” and he also described hip-hop as a “truly multimodal movement that deserves a multimodal history.” If I may extend this idea, Graphixia has been great at exploring the multimodality of comics, and I think comics and music will be an enlightening foray into exploring this multimodality further. So, without further ado, here’s a little on my favourite musical comics of late.

Alec Longstreth’s three-part musical story Weezer Fan is still in progress, and is being serialized in his long-running comic, Phase 7, which has by turns been comprised of autobiographical stories, chapters of Longstreth’s now completed Bone-esque epic Basewood, and other miscellanea such as the three chapters of Weezer Fan, the third of which is due to be released later this year. The first part is ten very short stories, each one corresponding to one of the ten tracks on Weezer’s seminal Blue Album and narrating an anecdote from Longstreth’s life as a Weezer fan. The second part depicts Longstreth’s first attendance at a Weezer show and interactions with other fans, and is the closest in content and composition to the fanzines the Weezer Fan series can trace its lineage back to. And the third part will catalogue all of Longstreth’s experiences at Weezer shows.

At this point, perhaps a disclaimer is necessary: I am also a Weezer superfan, and would say they are probably my favourite band (but I don’t want to talk about Hurley). So much so that I’m considering getting a tattoo of their winged W logo. So, as you can imagine, finding a thing that combines on of my most cherished things (Weezer) with my favourite art form and the focus of my doctoral research (Alternative Comics) was like several Christmases all at once. It was like if Jeffrey Brown showed up at my house on Christmas Day, dressed up as Father Christmas, and gave me a huge stack of comics and CDs. As such, my love for Weezer might colour my judgment and any analyses which follow. But I’ll do my best to remain objective, and I don’t believe Weezer fandom is a prerequisite for reading and enjoying these comics.

The opening of part one finds a young Longstreth’s first exposure to Weezer being coloured somewhat by the circumstance of their soundtracking some reckless driving. Here, the musical notes are combined with lines of varying length and shape to provide a shorthand for the teenage Longstreth’s discomfort which draws upon the existing visual conventions and symbols of comics to create a neat, recognizable visual expression of Longstreth’s experience. Similarly, when it is necessary to up the ante to show Longstreth’s emotion growing from discomfort to panic over the course of the next few panels, the lines grow closer together and the song’s lyrics are shown in large capital letters which are obscured by Longstreth’s thought bubble and body, showing the reader that the music is loud and obtrusive, but that the panic created by the reckless driving is taking centre stage in the narrative. The same line patterns and typographic depictions of the lyrics are used at the end of the story when the teenaged Longstreth discovers Weezer properly and rocks out alone to Weezer in his bedroom, reprising the adrenaline rush created by the car journey but turning it into a positive energy rather than a negative one.

The Weezer Fan stories continue to use music in this vein throughout. Thus, music, lyrics and and musical notation are used as devices in the same way as other icons and visual shorthands in comics, such as emanata, which is one basic level of how comics-music synthesis can work. I’ll leave it to those who close-read comics and analyse them from a linguistic or formalist angle to explore this further, and I hope someone does study this closely for a paper in the future.

Another level of music-comics synthesis lies in fandom and the crossover between alternative comics and fanzines, two cultures with a shared history. I suggested that fanzines directly inspired Longstreth’s Weezer comics, and this is made clear in part one, where we see the teenage Longstreth joining the Weezer fan club and receiving the Weezine, Weezer’s fanzine. Pointing to him is a caption which reads “has no idea that in seven years he will be obsessed with making zines of his own.” It wouldn’t be a stretch to draw from this that Weezer fandom directly contributed to Longstreth’s becoming a cartoonist and shaped his approach to comics, particularly as Phase 7 has been self-published since its inception and continues to be so, following the tradition of Dave Sim and Jeff Smith. Zines and their DIY ethic have long been a springboard for experimental and alternative cartooning, as well as a niche, underground cultural space in which music and comics have rubbed along together, and there is a synthesis there which has fed through from their history to Longstreth’s Weezer comics.

The second part of Weezer Fan feels much more like a zine, as the story of Longstreth’s first Weezer concert is followed by a selection of black and white photos and a prose description of his research for the comic, which is classic fanzine territory: photos of the band, photos of the band interacting with fans, and general fan love-ins. The story also concludes with a scan of the ticket to the show, in a showing off of fan cred which slots neatly into the comic narrative. It could perhaps even be argued that the ticket itself constitutes a panel, as it is not enclosed in borders like all the other depictions of Weezer-ness in the comic. This could even be stretched to the depictions of Weezer’s album covers in sequence on the cover of the forthcoming Phase 7 #019, which line up like panels to narrate the story of Weezer’s career.

These areas of music-comics synthesis exhibited by Weezer Fan just begin to scratch the surface of the myriad ways in which comics and music work brilliantly together, narratively, culturally, materially and philosophically, and there are clearly many great in-depth studies that could be done in any of the areas I have touched upon. On the issue of Weezer fandom, as I said earlier, I don’t believe you have to be a Weezer fan, or even be aware of Weezer’s music or what they sound like, to be able to enjoy these comics. But it certainly helps. The adrenaline rush surrounding My Name is Jonas does gain an extra later of multimodal brilliance if one is aware of the song, or can go as far as to listen to it (as I did) while reading the anecdote about Longstreth’s discovery of Weezer. However, the narrative intent of the comic is still accessible and clear, and with or without the soundtrack, the comics use music and its language and conventions to great effect, as many other comics do.

The final two pages of Weezer Fan Part One depict a teenage Longstreth listening to Only In Dreams, The Blue Album’s eight-minute, euphoric conclusion, alone in the dark in the living room of his parental home. The panels are all overlaid with a halftone pattern which represents both the darkness and the euphoria, casting the images in a different light to all those which precede them in the comic as Longstreth describes the rare quality of Weezer’s music and the reason they are his favourite band and that The Blue Album is his favourite album. “It’s the kind of music that expands inside of you, amplifying your senses, making you feel more alive,” he writes. His teenage self, drawn at peace with a slight smile, is the centre of the panel with the musical notes surrounding him, as if they are leaving his body and he has indeed become the amplifier. In depicting them thus, Longstreth shows us that comics can capture the qualities of music to create a unique multimodal reading experience, and I don’t know about you, but that certainly makes me feel alive.

Works Cited

Longstreth, Alec. Basewood. Richmond: AdHouse Books, 2014.

Longstreth, Alec. Phase 7 #017. Phase Seven Comics, 2013.

Longstreth, Alec. Phase 7 #018. Phase Seven Comics, 2013.

Piskor, Ed. Hip Hop Family Tree (Fantagraphics Treasury Edition). Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2013.

Wilkins, Peter. “#164: (Un)Familiar History: Ed Piskor’s Hip Hop Family Tree.” Graphixia. 2014. [URL:http://www.graphixia.cssgn.org/2014/04/25/164-unfamiliar-history-ed-piskors-hip-hop-family-tree/]

#172 Music in Comics: Intermediality and Mahler’s Mystery Music

benoit — Tue, 24 Jun 2014 15:00:26 +0000

Well-known for his absurd humor, the Austrian cartoonist Mahler develops in his mini-comic Mystery Music a visualization of musical sounds as mysterious black things with all sorts of shapes, but quite often with a turd-like aspect. If you take that comparison far enough, you can easily imagine all kind of connections between music and defecating, but that is certainly not what I am going to develop in the following lines; after all, Mahler’s (that is, the cartoonist’s) music is a mystery, and perhaps it should remain so. By visually materializing music, Mahler creates an ironic distance, drawing attention to the way music and sound are usually depicted in comics. In this regard, Mahler’s ‘experimentation’ cannot be dissociated from its publication context. Mahler’s mini-comic is not a ‘proper’ mini-comic: it has its outlook and its dimension, but it is not photocopied and stapled by the author or by a small-press collective. Though Mahler is Austrian, his comic was specifically produced for and published by L’Association in the ‘Patte de Mouche’ series. This series is a collection of mini-comics that point out the roots of the publisher in the small-press. The ‘Patte de Mouche’ comics often carry out a playful investigation of the comics form through constraints (OuBaPo), narrative tricks and graphic games. Mahler’s mini-comic on music clearly follows that line by estranging the reader from traditional representations of music in comics. Perhaps at cost of losing the fun of the story, I think it might be fruitful to look at Mystery Music from an intermedial perspective, using theoretical concepts that might highlight some interesting points about Mahler’s work. The intermedial framework and terminology proposed by Irina O. Rajewsky (2005) might prove useful in this regard. She focuses on intermediality “as a category for the concrete analysis of texts or other kinds of media products” (2005: 51), putting forward subcategories to distinguish between various specific types of intermedial phenomena. One of these subcategories is what Rajewsky calls ‘intermedial references,’ that is: “Rather than combining different medial forms of articulation, the given media-product thematizes, evokes, or imitates elements or structures of another, conventionally distinct medium through the use of its own media-specific means” (53). This type of intermediality is further distinguished from others by an ‘as if’ character: a media-product becomes intermedial by alluding to another medium (be it a concrete instance or the medium itself). As Rajewsky writes:

Intermedial references, then, can be distinguished from intramedial (and thus intertextual) ones by the fact that a given media product cannot use or genuinely reproduce elements or structures of a different medial system through its own media-specific means; it can only evoke or imitate them. Consequently, an intermedial reference can only generate an illusion of another medium’s specific practices (55)

The difference from other types of intermediality, here, is that there is only an illusion of an actual blending of various media. By applying this category to Mystery Music, I mean to use it as a methodological tool apt to bring to the fore certain elements with relationship to its representation of music: I do not mean to suggest that this is the only type of intermediality present in comics, nor that it is the only way that comics can represent music (as the previous posts make clear); neither am I engaging with the question of intermediality within the comics form. The basic issue for comics to represent music is that they have to visualize it in some way. Of course, as W.J.T. Mitchell (2005) has argued, “there are no visual media” and “all media are mixed media” inasmuch as they always entail “some mixture of sensory, perceptual, and semiotic elements,” albeit in a medium-specific way (2005: 260). As Ian Hague’s recent Comics and the Senses (2014) makes clear, “comics is not just a visual medium” (26) and their reading call up an array of senses. Hague’s focus is, for instance, on the “actual/audible sounds that comics make and/or employ, as opposed to the visually represented sounds upon the page” (27). My own emphasis is, more traditionally, on the visualization of music on the page. The way Mahler represents music is highly interesting because it subverts comics conventions, not so much regarding the representation of music (which appears to be highly varied), but as far as the way comics visual represent sounds. Speech balloons and onomatopoeia are among the most discussed elements of comics, especially in early scholarly attempts to define the form. They are conventionally agreed upon signs, visually delineating sounds that are not supposed to be visible in the diegetic world evoked by the drawings. These conventions, however, make room for tremendous variety and creativity: as Hannah Miodrag rightfully remarks, “the conventionalized shorthand that forms the cartoon lexicon is exemplary in proving extremely flexible” (2013: 182). The ‘trick’ that Mahler plays out in Mystery Music consists in representing sound as a kind of visible ‘soundtrack’ existing materially in the fictional world of the mini-comic. Each gag is based on the material shape that the musician creates when performing, ending with a jury physically receiving the music as a literal thing. A saxophone jazz solo gives shape to a long snake; an extraterrestrial flying saucer turned into a xylophone results in a pile of small black balls; a single stroke of an electric guitar creates a wall; an opera singer forms three big black globes; a pipe organ produces an enormous excrement-like shape. The shape clearly evokes the sound of the music made by a particular instrument. The final gag further brings this analogy to a peak: after the performance of the ‘big band,’ the curtain falls, and the story ends on a final page-wide panel depicting a worker picking up the physical excess-products of the music as if it were trash. This specific convention that Mystery Music establishes is also brought to the fore when the lack of sound is represented in the same ways as music is. Striking the gong transforms the performer into a shot putter: failing to hit the gong, he throws the stick to the jury, who contemplates a note-like black shape. Throughout his mini-comic, Mahler thus reflexively draws attention to the ‘as if’ character of his intermedial reference. Music turns out to be a physical thing, the material remains of a musical performance. This mysterious physicality foregrounds the visualization of the music (and the lack of sound) and the conventions of the cartoon lexicon: Mahler’s sounds are things that characters produce and can interact with because, ultimately, they are all made of the same substance of lines and ink. In the end, Mahler’s gags are read as much for his minimalist drawing style as for the gags. In his pioneering article on the narrativity of the line, Jared Gardner convincingly argues that:

The story of the graphic narrative is always finally two stories, equally and at once: the story of what happens to the characters and (in the graphic traces we cannot erase but never fully recover) the story of the telling of the story itself (2011: 67).

The minimalism of Mahler’s graphic style allows him to play with small, singular details sustaining the humor of his stories: the stick of the gong player is one example, but also the sticks of the extraterrestrial musician function as his antennas, the head of the pan-flute player moves alongside its instrument as if she had no neck, etc. Finally, Mahler’s comic also involves actual sound: it was adapted into an animation short that proposes an actual soundtrack for the mini-comic. The short further continues the mystery of the mini-comic with a surprising UFO-like soundtrack, continuing the reflexive effect that foregrounds the ‘as if’ character of intermedial referencing, insofar as the video both evokes the mini-comic it was adapted from and the medium of music (blending Rajewsky’s category with the one she calls ‘medial transposition,’ i.e. adaptation). Works Cited Gardner, Jared. “Storylines.” SubStance 40.1 (2011): 53-69. Hague, Ian. Comics and the Senses: A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels. London: Routledge, 2014. Mahler, Nicolas. Mystery Music. Paris: L’Association, 2006. Miodrag, Hannah. Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. Mitchell, W. J. T. “There Are No Visual Media.” Journal of Visual Culture 4 (2005): 257-266. Rajewsky, Irina O. “Intermediality, Intertextuality and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality.” Intermédialités 6 (2005): 43-64.

#173 Men without Women: Jeff Lemire’s Essex County, Hockey, and Mythical Canadian Masculinity

wilkinsp — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 04:35:55 +0000

One of the British Columbia towns I grew up in was Trail, home of the glorious Smoke Eaters hockey team that won the World Championship in 1939 and 1961 and competed for the Allan Cup, the pinnacle of senior men's hockey in Canada. In my early teens going to Smokies games was the primary winter weekend entertainment. The players worked in the Cominco smelter during the week and assumed the heroic mantle of hockey stars on the weekends in the Western International Hockey League, playing against teams like The Spokane Jets and The Kimberley Dynamiters. The league was full of players who had played a few games in the NHL and who might play in the NHL one day.

When my minor hockey team played on a Friday afternoon, we could smell the fat being heated up for the evening Smoke Eaters game's chips. The hockey was vital and violent, and with every game you felt the history of the city permeating events, with the great stars from 1961, most of them children of Italian immigrants, and the great stars of the future, like Ray Ferraro, in attendance. I'm sure there were people in Trail who didn't like hockey, but on game night it felt like everyone was there, with the hardcore fans standing and smoking behind the last row of wooden plank seats. Senior hockey is dead in the Kootenays now along with much of the mythical power of hockey in Canada, the Smoke Eaters exist only as a junior hockey team, and the NHL is an antiseptic, dreary league with the exception of a few sparks in the playoffs, when the rules change (largely by disappearing). Jeff Lemire’s Essex County took me back to the mythical world of Canadian hockey with startling clarity and made me reflect on the way that Canadian identity has been so wrapped up in the masculine sacrifice of the heroes of our national game. Apart from Chester Brown's Louis Riel, perhaps, Essex County is the most Canadian comic book I have read, largely because of the place of hockey in the LeBeuf masculine family lineage. And it is an especially masculine family lineage; like classic Disney films, Essex County kills off mothers. The crux of the story is that Lester Papineau does not know that Jimmy LeBeuf, the former hockey player who works at the local Esso gas station, is his father. Jimmy played one game with the Toronto Maple Leafs. In that game he scored a goal and was then hit so hard that it not only ended his brief career but also left him "not quite right" ever since. Lester lives on a farm with his uncle. Jimmy is supposed to stay away from Lester, for reasons that Lemire conceals--something to do with his treatment of Lester’s mother Claire--but forms a bond with him when Lester buys superhero comics from the gas station. When they meet at the creek, Jimmy is willing to participate in Lester's alien invasion fantasies and appreciate his self-drawn comics. Lemire’s drawing style in Essex county seems to identify both with Jimmy’s post-injury state of mind and Lester’s bereft orphanhood. His lines look like they were drawn by a really talented person drawing with his wrong hand. The lines, which appear barely in control and highly skilled at the same time, carry the suffering of the characters, particularly the hockey playing men. Jimmy's face conveys a depth of longing and despair: his eyes are wider apart than they should be, and his nose looks like it was carved out of rock. This is the face of of the hockey player as it exists in the Canadian imagination, tough, knocked about. Jimmy’s “man-child” aspect and his ability to identify with Lester’s superhero fantasies capture the out-of-touch with reality masculinity of Essex County. On the one hand, lies the world of mundane work at the gas station, driving street cars, working the farm. On the other lies the imaginary realm of hockey, where spectacular feats of heroism are possible, but with huge risks, as Jimmy’s state indicates. His great uncle Lou also had to leave the game with a wrecked knee. But Jimmy tells Lester that he is mystified when people talk as if his one game in the NHL was the worst day of his life when in fact, in his mind, it was the best. Playing that game and scoring that goal was worth the addled brain that followed. A character like Vince, Jimmy’s grandfather, is an oddity. A talented player who could make it to the NHL, he gives up the game cheerfully for domestic bliss and life on the farm, for which he is punished by the death of his wife and daughter in a car crash that Jimmy somehow survives. Indeed, Essex County strands its male characters. Lemire isolates them and draws their pain. The orphan as literary figure exemplifies masculine self-determination and freedom. Without parents to guide his upbringing or provide genetic comparisons, the orphan creates himself through his choices and actions, the perfect existentialist. But the flipside of orphanhood is loneliness and disconnection. Lou LeBeuf, who appears to have no sexual relationship apart from a one night stand with his brother’s wife, Beth, expresses the plight of the individual as disconnected atom. He says that there are two ways to be absolutely alone: in the middle of a crowd or in total isolation. But this isolation seems unnecessary. Why choose it? Lester appears to be so stunned by his orphaned state that any relationship is impossible. He can barely stand to eat dinner or watch a hockey game with his uncle. He retreats into his own solipsistic fantasy world of Power Man. Comic books are both the antidote to his despair and the cause of it: traumatised by his mother’s death, he wears a mask and a cape to school even though his school mates taunt him for it. Once again, hockey acts as the saviour: Lester’s success as a hockey player buys him status, just as it has done for his father, grandfather, and great uncle. It doesn’t buy him social or familial connection though. It’s curious that Lemire is so adamant about denying his male characters such connection. The gender politics of Essex County are decidedly odd. Relations with women, in the conventional sexual social sense, offer a way out of masculine isolation but the male characters either do not choose that path or get punished for it if they do, like Vince, and homosexuality doesn’t even seem like a possibility for these solitary, haunted, regretful men. What these characters seek, perhaps, is a comprehensible affective relationship with each other: Fathers, sons, and brothers. The barrier between Jimmy and Lester and the disharmony between Lou and Vince LeBeuf after Lou has sex with Vince’s wife Beth (there’s a lot of speculation that Lou might be the father of Beth’s daughter and Jimmy’s father Mary.) Women seem to interfere with these masculine relationships. Beth’s appearance on the scene destroys Lou’s fantasy of he and Vince making it together in hockey. His sexual dalliance with her is a form of revenge, perhaps. In fact, Essex County is structured around Lou LeBeuf’s ressentiment towards Vince’s betrayal of hockey, Canada’s true totem and merciless father. While Lou reflects warmly on the metaphorical connection between hockey and family when he returns to the arena after years of being a Toronto street car driver to be what Canadians affectionately call a “rink rat,” someone who sharpens skates and drives the Zamboni, his affection screens the fact that hockey cruelly sacrifices men like him and Jimmy to drab, mundane work when physical ruination kills their heroic aspirations. We might argue that Lemire presents a feminine perspective on isolation and orphanhood with Anne Byrne, the nurse who is the focus of Book Three, but her story carries less weight and has less independence than that of the LeBeufs and Papineaus because it is somewhat detached from the story arc that runs through the three books. Anne is the return of the dead mother in the form of a nurse: she looks after Lou LeBeuf in the nursing home, and she also is the catalyst in a potential reconnection between Jimmy and Lester as father and son. Her job in the narrative is to perform emergency triage on these broken male characters, the sons of hockey, even as her own family breaks down: her husband has died and her son is a resentful teenager. Because Essex County is more dependent on images than words, it’s hard to tell whether it is critiquing or supporting the Canadian ideology of masculine identification with, and sacrifice to, the game at the expense of women. Lemire’s graphic narrative is like Ernest Hemingway’s writing in this regard: conventional masculine toughness is shot through with frailty and weakness. And yet the male characters are so invested in their own isolation, they can’t see any other way to be.

#174 The Line in Jeff Lemire's Essex County: A Topographic Poetics for Comics

admin — Tue, 15 Jul 2014 23:59:17 +0000

That frickin' bird. It shows up everywhere in Jeff Lemire's Essex County. Its first appearance is marked by a symbolic rather than literal representation: a small boy trying to fly. It's a shadow really, a thick darkly drawn conflation of lines, flung both by brush and narrative up into the heights. The oddly misshapen lines reappear a little later in the narrative as the boy's shadow. It trails him awkwardly as he awkwardly marches into the gas station to purchase a comic from his as yet undiscovered father. Finally, quite a ways into the narrative the literal bird appears on the horizon, quite abruptly in terms of sequence, and gently touches down on the barn where the boy has spent his time feeding the chickens and reading the above mentioned comic to himself. Birds appear elsewhere in Book One: Tales from the Farm, but they tend to be chickens, and chickens can't fly. The metaphor here focuses more on the typical circle of life stuff and the boy's inability to fly away from his situation. The chickens here are frequently connected to the cross, a harkening back to both the absence of religious practice and its yet still overbearing presence in French-Canadian life, particularly that life from which the "Papineau" clan is clearly descended despite being placed in Southern Ontario--if we are indeed meant to call forward the real Essex County (a topography of particulars). Crosses to bear are with the grounded chickens, but the bird, that shadowed, thick, darkly drawn lined bird mentioned above, connected to the boy, is a distorted version. A kind of off-kilter, slanted, gangly, disturbed cross and it is most often identifiable by the lines--both the drawn lines and narrative lines--it introduces. Its trajectory is always outwards, a perspective of lines pushing outward to a finite point on the horizon and a widening foreground. That bird also runs throughout the Essex County narrative, overseeing its progression and guiding its evolution. It, like the comic itself, is made up of and represented through the line. Lemire's bird and the lines it both represents and oversees speak to topography, loosely the study and description of landscapes or shapes themselves--the features, measures, distinctions that mark borders, heights, nuances. It's also a branch of study that focuses on local detail, and how those local features might suggest local histories or cultures. Topography is a bird's science; a kind of "zoom in / zoom out" approach to understanding how space gets filled in relative to other filled in spaces. Most often, we think of topography in cartographic terms--those lines on a map that suggest distinctions such as hills, valleys, trees, pathways, and objects. A bald example is Essex County's family tree. There are several devices of the topographical line in here. One is the bird's downward and orderly trajectory through the family tree itself, telling us how to read and layout a topology for the narrative. Another is the gradual fade of the drawn line as the background image of the face degrades and lines are added to represent both age and a buildup of life experiences--the line as a topology of time. The faded and accumulated line frequently invokes resonance: connections to the past, the single-lined innocence of youth versus the collected, varicose veined line of age and experience, missing or faded memory, nostalgia--as if missing lines mean something and so does too many lines, too many connections. The line then functions as a topology for meaning. This emphasis on the line seems central to any poetics for comics. Any critique of comics must necessarily focus on the line as 1) metaphoric connection to the past, a literal harkening back to the lines of Kubert, Tardis, Eisner, Crumb (and so many others: Picasso, Rembrandt, DE Vinci dammit!) and the different topologies their lines--those distinct, always identifiable lines--represent; and 2) as central to the reading of symbols, narrative, and stories that unfold in a graphic situation. The image above suggests another way that Lemire asserts topologies: the tilted and shifting frames that separate the narrative and at times the action itself. These lines, contrary to typical comics form, are often tilted or cocked at an angle. This transcendent line, slanted and uneven, tilts like a curious bird's eye, perspective always slightly off-balance, darting, blinking, curious. As if we, and the narrative we see unravelling before us, were perched precariously on a wire observing the landscapes below. We are reading these lines from a shifting, curious, unstable, topologic perspective that zooms in and zooms out, looks down and looks up. We wander in and out of perspective teetering and tottering through the comic frame, itself a topological framework for the line. These shifting topological frames are broken and transcended. The topology of place--Essex County--remains static while the bird motions through it, pushing the narrative forward, pushing time onward, and forcing the narrative outward into other spaces away from a place of origin but always that place--Essex County--remains in the background, its perspective etched in lines out (or in) toward a finite horizon. Contrarily, the bird rises, a figure of outward as Charles Olson would suggest, and moves off the page. This action is, too, fractured by the line. The telephone pole shadows in the spread below recall the elevated point of view above, mimicking the tilted comic frames which have now become both artificial borders and simulacrum that separate and recall the literal shadowed topographical, networked, lines that lead both outward and inward, back and forth, in and out of Essex County. In Lemire's collection, we are always disconnected, reconnected, unconnected and connected by lines. These connections can move away from us or toward us, into the horizon or away from the foreground--a topology of connection. The final frame of Essex County again shows the bird. But, is the bird coming or going? How are we to read this? The bird is so evenly placed that we cannot read this. We have only lines and these lines tell us we can go either way. Are the lines on the "Leaving Essex County" sign indicative of a sunset or a sunrise? These unknowns; a topology of ambiguity. The yield here is how Essex County's bird tells / shows us how to read a comic through the line. Connections back and connections forward. Thick, aggressive blotched lines and elegant straight lines; faded, vacuous lines; bunched, scribbled, unsteady lines. It suggests we need to look more stridently at how the line reflects both a hinge to the construction of narrative and the creative mark that the line represents to the artist. What strikes about Essex County when one reads it in context is how confidently it represents Lemire's line--from hockey histories (see picture of author), Canadian places, French-Canadian names, to the work of Crumb, Tardis, and the irreverence of Reza Farazmand. In short, the book suggests that the line is foundational for critiquing comics and that Essex County is our first real bright example of a topography of comics. Now, we must hunt among stones.

#175 Canadian Superheroics in Jeff Lemire's Essex County

Grayb — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 16:09:25 +0000

I have to confess a certain disappointment with Jeff Lemire of late. This isn't entirely fair. The people I should be disappointed with are the folks at DC Comics, but since I'm quite literally always disappointed with everything DC does, that's not any fun. [gallery ids="3849,3847,3846"] You see, Jeff Lemire took over Justice League of America recently with the intent to relaunch it as Justice League Canada and I, Alpha Flight super fan and part-time Professional Canadian, was pretty flipping excited. But then, the news changed: there would be no Justice League Canada; instead, "Justice League Canada" became the first story arc of Justice League United (in Canada, we got Justice League Canada covers anyway, because pandering), and instead of my dreamed-of nouveau Alpha Flight, we got a typical (kind of boring*) Justice League story set in Canada. To Lemire's credit, this is more like when Alpha Flight went to Calgary than when Archie went to Vancouver: the geography of Moosonee / Moose Factory actually matters to the narrative. But there's a feeling of tokenism here. Adam Strange is Canadian now for... reasons? And while I applaud the inclusion of Equinox and the decision to make her a Cree teenager (this is good, DC -- more of this!), it's hard not to feel like she will fade to black once this run comes to an end, because the storyline is not spectacular enough for me to think she'll take flight. The disappointment I feel at not getting my very own DC version of Alpha Flight is profound. This feels like when the comics atrocity that was Omega Flight happened at the end of Civil War and all my beloved Alpha Flight characters died. Why is it so hard to make Canadian superheroes stick in a global context? So when I reread Essex County for this week's Graphixia** post, I did so with all these questions about Canada and superheroes and what it means to represent the nation in a Canadian context. [caption id="attachment_3852" align="aligncenter" width="240"] I feel the red cape is poignant because Canada.[/caption] This has informed a lot of my thinking about Canadian comics, generally, ever since fellow Graphixian Peter and I decided to read Scott Pilgrim as a superhero comic that inverts and challenges expectations of Canadian national identity. (Our work will be in the forthcoming Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels.) Drawing on the work of scholars like Ryan Edwardson, Bart Beaty, and Jason Dittmer and Soren Larsen, I'm starting to put together for myself a sense of what is significant and, in turn, what matters about Canadian superheroes. What makes them heroes, or not so much heroes? In Essex County, our protagonist Lester wants to be a superhero; this desire is how he sublimates the loss of his mother, his feelings about his unknown father figure, and his anxiety about living with the uncle he barely knows. His fascination with superhero comics (at the annoyance of his uncle) and his vigilance against aliens gives his life a focus it won't find again until he discovers his talent for hockey. And as Peter points out in his Essex County post, the obsession fuels his isolation:

Lester appears to be so stunned by his orphaned state that any relationship is impossible. He can barely stand to eat dinner or watch a hockey game with his uncle. He retreats into his own solipsistic fantasy world of Power Man. Comic books are both the antidote to his despair and the cause of it: traumatised by his mother’s death, he wears a mask and a cape to school even though his school mates taunt him for it.

But I think it's also protective. Lester is wounded; the only way he can promise himself he won't get hurt again is to remove the possibility of relationship or connection. The mocking of his peers is minor compared to the traumatic loss of his mother and the restructuring of his life with his uncle. Lester's identity as Power Man is protective. It is also about escape. As Power Man, he flies over Essex County and away from the farm that constrains him. The story opens with the choice between flying in his imagination or feeding the chickens in his quotidian life. That opening juxtaposition sets up the forces in Lester's life and suggests why he retreats into, as Peter terms it, this "solipsistic fantasy." The life of a superhero is often an isolated one -- they do good for mankind at the expense of having a whole life of their own -- and this isolation appeals to Lester. But isolation is a choice Lester makes. He is able to forge connections. When he confesses to Jimmy that he is, in fact, a superhero, they bond over how seriously Jimmy takes Lester's imaginary world; it is this connection that Lester's uncle can never provide him with because he isn't able to connect with the idea of comics, superheroes, and aliens. It's all meaningless to him. There is nothing particularly Canadian about Power Man. Lester doesn't fantasize being Captain Canuck. Superheroics here are not about fulfilling a national project or defining oneself in relation to the nation -- as Peter points out, that's the role of hockey. But Power Man allows Lester to get to hockey, where he can join the rest of the men in the community in defining his masculinity and identity in a way that they can relate to. His major battle as Power Man, where he destroys the alien spacecraft and avenges the "death" of Jimmy, leads directly to Lester trading in his cape and goggles for a hockey cards: the imaginary power of Power Man becomes the impotent power of the Maple Leafs.

In this scene, Jimmy orchestrates a final conflict for Power Man: first, in order to write himself out of Lester's life as per Ken's request; and second, to hand over his hockey card and, by extension, his identity to Lester. By forming a connection with Jimmy succeeding in this heroic task, Lester brings his need for the protective, escapist, and sustaining myth of Power Man. In the end, Lester takes the card from Jimmy and leaves his cape behind. And the only one who sees the transition, in its moment, is the bird Dave explored so thoroughly in his post. -- And finally, official soundtrack to writing about Essex County: [youtube_video id="XZ-CKaJFCUg"] -- * Kind of boring might not be fair. We're only a few issues in. But so far: pretty boring. What is it about DC Comics that makes me want to nap in my chair? Hashtag Marvel girl. ** I am so freaking happy to have all Graphixians riffing on a single topic again. I don't understand why we ever don't do this.

#163 Jack Kirby: Writer

davidrobertson — Thu, 17 Apr 2014 02:16:39 +0000

Jack Kirby’s writing came in for a lot of criticism in the 1970s after he made the break from Marvel Comics to DC Comics. And as time has gone on, Kirby’s dialogue can increasingly be read as stilted, in an age where “believable” or failing that, witty interchange between characters is much prized. He is out of step with how culture has gone because he is so earnest in his writing.

Due to their great success in the 1960s at Marvel Comics, which were credited to Stan Lee as writer and Kirby as artist, it is tempting to look at those comics, compare them to Kirby’s later work and subtract the difference as being Lee’s contribution. There is much debate about who exactly was responsible for what though, as Gerard Jones states:

“Stan turned to Jack Kirby and through a process now eternally obscured by competing stories – both men claimed to have had all the basic ideas first – introduced Fantastic Four” (a)

Traditional notions of what a writer and an illustrator do Kirby are surely too simplistic when applied to comics, as recounted by Ronin Ro:

“When Stan saw the Surfer in his pages, he asked “Who the hell’s this?” “ I figured anybody as powerful as Galactus ought to have a herald who would go ahead of him and find planets,” Jack replied. “That’s a great idea!” (b)

Leaving aside the thorny issue of what exactly is meant by writer in these credits, amongst what one might assume to be the Lee contribution is snappy banter between characters, witty and self-knowing asides and a more general showman/ringmaster persona that he brought to the editorial side of his work.

This leaves Kirby with imaginative design in characters and environments, dramatic pacing, and a smaller or greater element of the plot depending on how detailed initial instruction from Lee was.

By the time Kirby is doing the writing and drawing at DC, the imaginative characters, locations and plots are intact (arguably even more so), and the action and story progression is still very dynamic. What has been lost is a street level, smart-talking point of entry. Lee’s writing was done in reaction to Kirby’s artwork. In a sense he was commenting on what Kirby had created in the artwork.

Kirby was always interested in creating new characters, situations and environments. In the late 60s, he proposed his New Gods ideas to Marvel, who didn’t want to use them. He took them to rivals DC instead.

Kirby often used Gods, or variations on powerful celestial beings, in his stories. His contention that he, and not Lee, came up with the idea to do comics based on Norse mythology gains credence from the fact that Kirby had already done a version of Thor at DC in 1957 before doing it for Marvel in 1962.

Kirby, Thor, DC Comics, 1957

Kirby was interested in technology, machinery, and philosophy. But anyone who thinks Kirby could not deliver on an emotional level would be mistaken. Just look at this one panel from Mister Miracle …

Kirby, Mister Miracle, DC Comics, 1974

It’s melodramatic, but even without any context, you have the sense of what Oberon (on the left) is feeling in this picture.

When Kirby returned to Marvel in the mid 70s, his contract afforded him the opportunity to officially write, draw and edit his own books, a condition that Lee was willing to capitulate to in order to get Kirby back. He set to work on Eternals…

Kirby, Eternals, Marvel Comics, 1976

Kirby was keen to create more new stories, characters and situations, in opposition to what had become the Marvel norm, whereby all the comics fed into each other to varying extents (all characters in Marvel Comics had to meet Spider-Man at some point, be they Howard the Duck, Transformers or the Frankenstein monster). Kirby did not want to create stories which had to negotiate through the convoluted continuity of twenty or so years of previously published comics. As Sean Howe writes,

“In Captain America, assistant editor Roger Stern had to rewrite a Kirby reference to a flying saucer being “the first alien space craft ever to visit the Earth, “ a description that would discount scores of Marvel adventures and not a few of the characters.” (c)

I only later read any of the background on Kirby’s self-penned comics. Summing up the industry view of him at this point, Mark Evanier writes:

“Just then, he’d stopped beoing Jack Kirby, the guy who created, or co-created, so many successful new comics. With the end of his contract in sight, he was Jack Kirby, the guy who did those wonky, unreadable books that didn’t sell so great.”(d)

Evanier also writes:

“Years after, his seventies work would be regarded more favourably, and even reprinted, right along with everything else he did, time and again. Some would even say the sales figures weren’t as dour as the rumours of the times insisted”. (d)

Anecdotally, I bought and read them. Perhaps there is a generational element to one’s appreciation of Kirby’s writing. The late 1970s Captain America were actually the first comics I read by Kirby, and I thought they were terrific as a kid. Instead of the wry, slightly arch dialogue of Lee though, in Kirby’s self-scripted comics we instead have an earnest, almost poetic series of statements. These are sentences that no-one has ever said or ever will say. They are not capturing a realistic conversational tone, they are lines which aspire to be about the magical, the fantastic, the wonderful. In this respect they are more in tune with the artwork. The totality of the comic is now Jack Kirby.

Kirby, Silver Star, Pacific Comics, 1983

Postscript

Incidentally, although Kirby’s dialogue and writing is unique, another writer whose work reminds me of him is Ann Nocenti. In Longshot she is also operating in a similarly fantastical environment filled with outlandish characters. See this following discourse…

Nocenti, Adams, Longshot, Marvel Comics, 1986

Jones, G. (2005) Men of tomorrow: geeks, gangsters and the birth of the comic book, London: Wiliam Heinemann, p.295

Ro, R. (2004) Tales to astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and the American comic book revolution, New York: Bloomsbury, p.99

Howe, S. (2012) Marvel comics: the untold story, New York: Harper, pp.194-195

Evanier, M. (2008) Kirby: king of comics, Abrams, New York, p.187

#173 The Roots of Canadian Identity in Lemire's Essex County

admin — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 04:35:55 +0000

#174 The Line in Jeff Lemire's Essex County: A Topographic Poetics for Comics

admin — Tue, 15 Jul 2014 23:59:17 +0000

#175 Canadian Superheroics in Jeff Lemire's Essex County

admin — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 16:09:25 +0000

Lester appears to be so stunned by his orphaned state that any relationship is impossible. He can barely stand to eat dinner or watch a hockey game with his uncle. He retreats into his own solipsistic fantasy world of Power Man. Comic books are both the antidote to his despair and the cause of it: traumatised by his mother’s death, he wears a mask and a cape to school even though his school mates taunt him for it.

#176 The Roots of Canadian Identity in Lemire's Essex County

smarsden — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 05:03:08 +0000

Jeff Lemire is something of a chameleon – unlike most of comics’ author / illustrators, he never seems to shy away from a particular genre in the medium. My exposure to his work has been predominantly through his efforts with DC comics in Animal Man, Sweet Tooth, the recent (and very underrated) Trillium and (the sadly not underrated enough) Justice League United. More superhero oriented, these series show him to have a nuanced interpretation of protagonists in his creation of deeply flawed characters and problematic relationships; but instead of trying to find ideals, as most superhero stories do, he reminds us of the import of subjectivity in the human experience and that one’s interpretation of heroism depends on what’s needed in one’s life at the time. This approach oddly makes it easier to identify with his stories, regardless of how farfetched some of them might be, as his characterization and thematic development are gritty, morose and (like his art at points, as Peter pointed out) ugly. Lemire’s much lauded Canadiana trilogy Essex County deals with these concepts writ large through shattering - and ultimately broadening - our concept of what it means to be a member of a family. The story is suggestive of multiple approaches to identity formation that allow the reader to choose which motivator Lemire thinks is most important as influenced by outside forces (though he certainly takes nurture over nature for granted). The most obvious of these, almost cloyingly so, is through nationalistic pursuits. When reading Essex County, it’s easy to see its glaring focus on what it means to be Canadian through stereotypes that oddly hit home – the LeBeufs are very much a hockey family, and they quite clearly derive their understanding of heroism, masculinity and identity through the sport (the alternative we’re presented with, almost as Canadian, is the Papineau family whose identity comes from working the land). Most of the interactions reference hockey in some way, even when the focus is on a lack of interaction; when Lester denies his uncle some much needed family time in front of a Bruins game, he still heads downstairs to watch Hockey Night in Canada on his own. Essex County is so Canadian that it will allow its characters isolation from bloodline yet not from its national pastime, almost as if doing so would be too farfetched. That young Lester looks for identity in heroism through hockey is unsurprising, however, as he can’t find it anywhere else in his life – every other character he encounters is reluctant or damaged or both. Lou, his unsung father, is a stereotypical hockey playing Canadian who almost made it save for the fact that he has been crippled and made simple through an accident on the ice – an accident that reveals Lou is so Canadian that he cannot force himself to regret the injury – and who Lester looks to as a father figure seemingly only because of his past abilities in the rink.

Lester pursues identity through drawing comic books as well, creating his inspiring heroes instead of looking for them in his environment – and there is a sort of crossover here, as in Lester’s superhero fantasies that involve Jimmy, he’s always dressed in his hockey uniform to mirror the cape and mask that Lester himself wears. Spending his youth in costume, Lester seeks heroism through his own actions as well; however, he eventually gives this up to continue his drawing, creating fictions to mask the flaws he finds in his rural reality that he attempts to share with others, attempting to establish connection through storytelling. Nationalism through hockey and superheroes in Essex County becomes the safety net that catches us when blood fails – Lester, Jimmy, Mary and nearly every other character in the narrative lacks an understanding of their lineage. Familial paths cross consistently in the County, however these are serendipitous and normally go unacknowledged by the characters themselves. Lester’s chance meeting of his great uncle (or perhaps his grandfather, we’re never quite sure as Lemire implies one lineage through his dialogue and another through his art) in a snow covered field in the country dark is extremely revealing of this – neither is aware of who the other is, and both are struggling to find themselves either through the circular process of “going home” and “running away” (319).

The tragedy here is that both verbally acknowledge that they shouldn’t be alone when doing so, but neither offers to help the other – each instead heads on his own way. There is a bitter irony here, and a scathing criticism of our need to find ourselves solely through ourselves; Essex County is not a story of missed but ignored connections, and every character suffers because of it.

So when blood fails to help his characters find comfort or identity, Lemire suggests history instead, tracing back several generations of Essex County’s collective past. There is something of a revelation in his depiction, as he re-humanizes history from its frequent glossing over as a collection of rote facts: in his formation of the County over a hundred years prior, as everywhere, there is as much ambiguity of parentage and familial identity as there is in its present. As Dave points out, however, the only omniscience in the story comes in the form of the bird, an icon of the natural world that carries the truth of our lineages because there is too much uncertainty in our brief lives to do so ourselves - trying to do so is overwhelming. We see this again and again in Essex County, poignantly in the repeated image of the river and the events that take place over the centuries both on its shores and in the hockey games on the river itself when it freezes over. When Lou, trying to reconnect with his brother and family line, submerges himself here, he chokes and becomes lost in its depths: The river as a natural image connecting generations might be a bit cliche, but here Lemire works it quite well in showing that it's too powerful for us to ever really make use of in any productive way. All we have is the cultural moment in which to pursue ourselves and make meaningful connections with others. History, if only because of its scope, fails to be able to allow us to come to terms with identity. When we are introduced to hockey at the beginning of the graphic novel, it seems as if it’s a poor substitute for history, family, identity, aspiration and life in general. However by casting a dark pallor over the rest of his characters’ lives (not the least of which lies in the fraternal betrayal that results in dubious parentage), it becomes by comparison a necessary component of what it means to be Canadian and, more generally, a human being. And this seems to be what Lemire is driving at: identity and family are flawed concepts at best, and we need to find solace in nationalistic, collective pursuits if we’re to find anything at all. This realization seems to be unironic and ultimately satisfactory in attempting to find oneself – a fact that is underscored by a photo of Lemire as a young boy in a hockey uniform for the “about the author” final page of the collected edition of Essex County. What we are left with are Lemire’s typically flawed characters, driven to self imposed isolation, unknowingly connected through their landscape and blood but consciously connected through nationalistic pursuits. The reader understands the fragile, tenuous connections between these quiet lives in a way that the characters themselves never will, much in the same way that in our own lives we can’t see through the mesh of subjectivity that isolates us and divorces us from an understanding of our larger role in a historical, linear context. But it’s there nonetheless, and the roots of Canadian culture run as deep in Essex County as they ostensibly do in the rest of the country, even if they are too deep to be consciously perceived. We connect with others instead through the seemingly surface stories and stats of hockey and superheroes, and that might be why these stories are such an improbably important part of our culture. Narratives of heroism, through hockey or otherwise, are simply more easily understood and shared. One might find this a humble, sad testament, but Lemire’s story of a fractured family line that ultimately comes (sort of) together shows that these more surface stories don’t create connections but instead reveal them, even if we don’t understand their complexities. They create a common language that gives us an excuse to express ourselves, to establish our identities and ultimately to love one another even against difficult odds.

#177 What Is Not Drawn: Silence in Jeff Lemire's Essex County

pjohnston — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 19:48:21 +0000

After I read Essex County for the first time last month, following Peter’s first post about it, I tweeted that I saw Jeff Lemire as “The Raymond Carver of Comics.” It’s not always that valuable to make such cross-form comparisons, but it’s not a comparison I made lightly, and I think it hints at shared qualities that reveal something about our understanding of the central elements of comics – time and space as rendered in images, text and panels – and how Jeff Lemire puts them to use in Essex County. It’s also a comparison made by Darwyn Cooke in his introduction to the collected edition, which I skipped on my first reading but was pleased to note when I re-read the book in preparation for this post. “With a casual grace that would make the late Raymond Carver envious,” writes Cooke, “Lemire’s stories build out of innocuous and seemingly unconnected moments that gather and gain weight when viewed in a cumulative light.” (5) Lemire’s talent for the subtle, for the expert rendering of that which lies beneath the surface, has been discussed in this series already. Peter Wilkins and Scott Marsden have both examined Lemire’s treatment of Canadian identity, which is the all-consuming backdrop of Essex County and an undeniably influential presence, running throughout the book’s narrative; David N. Wright discussed Lemire’s lines, and reminded us of “how the line reflects both a hinge to the construction of narrative and the creative mark that the line represents to the artist”; and Brenna Clarke Gray discussed Canadian superheroics, pitting Lester’s made-up alter ego Power Man against his humdrum rural reality, his cape masking his own fear and the trauma of his mother’s death. As is often the case with analyses of Carver, and similar writers such as Alice Munro (whose Canadian landscapes I also felt were echoed in Essex County), looking at and understanding Essex County is as much about what is not said and what is not told, as what is. Perhaps more so. “What is not said” applies equally to the images as it does to the text and the dialogue – perhaps, as we’re looking at a comic, we can think of “what is not drawn.” This can extend not just to whatever elements of a depicted scene we perceive to be significantly absent, but to Lemire’s visual style and the choices made in inking, line thickness, and the interplay between black and white, as well as his overall decision to work in black and white, which is likely to be significantly informed by his own time, resources and finances as a cartoonist working alone in this instance, but still can be seen as a decision in keeping with the overall feel of Essex County. What is not said and what is not drawn work together as an imagetext, creating a subtle and unique portrait of Canadian life and Canadian identity. Lemire’s visual style is the key to this symbiosis. His lines are often ratty, like Gary Panter working on a larger scale with more breathing room. The brushstrokes of Lemire’s inking are broad, and he’s not afraid to use them to cast long shadows, a regular occurrence which results in them becoming a motif for the hidden, the unspoken. Bodies are somewhat angular, particularly their faces, in which eyes are mostly small black circles, hinting at the depth and pain in the characters’ minds behind them but giving little away. Cross-hatching is often eschewed in favour of large black spaces and black fills, emphasizing the shape of objects and elements as opposed to the detail interiors – again, the reader is shown simple exteriors, left to extrapolate and imagine and speculate on what lies beneath and inside the shapes and lines on the surface of the objects. In the above, for example, the sky beneath Lester as he imagines himself flying away from the farm where he lives with his uncle is almost literally a blank canvas – nothing but white space, unencumbered by details that could have been included, such as clouds or other textures. Lester’s desire to escape from his farmhouse is clear, of course, from the fact that he is speeding away from it. His body fills the majority of the first panel and breaks the frames, hinting at freedom briefly before he is again constrained by a full panel at the moment his uncle calls his name. Again, besides Lester’s figure and the dialogue, there is nothing in this panel except white space, leaving his uncle’s calling to take the place of the background. We are given only one word and no visual backdrop – so much is not said, and so much is not drawn, but from this we are given a portrait of the emptiness and bleakness of Lester’s life, of the silence of rural Canada which permeates throughout Essex County. Similarly, in the above image there is much said and much we can extrapolate from the silence and from what is not drawn. The Canadian landscape viewed from Lou’s porch is reduced to his deck and a few short, clipped brushstrokes, carrying with them the weight of his family history, invaded by the recurring presence of the crow, which speaks a sole “Kaw!” here, a rare communication with the characters, breaking its streak of appearances outside the main narrative of the story where it exists largely as an onlooker. This breaks, briefly, the feelings of detachment and distance which are created by the silence in Lemire’s landscapes, bringing them home to roost on Lou’s porch. The silence is also broken by the pt-pt-pt sound of the crow’s feet on the ground, one of the few instances of verbal depiction of sound in Essex County, which is also striking against the silent backdrop established over the previous 300 pages. Lou smiles back at the crow, and then the chapter is finished. This exchange follows a series of thought bubbles in which Lou tells himself “…there are only two ways to be completely alone in this world…lost in a crowd…or in total isolation. And here I am…alone again.” (331-332) As soon as he is finished thinking, however, the crow appears to remind him that he is not alone, and his smile and brief communication with the crow implies that he knows he is not alone, that his Canadian life is not all silence, despite his initial assertions to the contrary. As with Carver, where much of the depicted world is silent, that which breaks the silence finds great significance. It is in this aspect of storytelling that Lemire excels, using such elements as the crow to emphasise the positive messages hidden in the complex narratives of Essex County, which can seem bleak at times. It is a comic characterized by loneliness, and by silence – but it is not without warmth and not without sound, and it is in the breaks in the silence that we find the heart of Lemire’s Essex County. Bibliography Carver, Raymond. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? London: Vintage, 2003. Clarke Gray, Brenna. “#175: Canadian Superheroics in Jeff Lemire’s Essex County” Graphixia. 2014. [URL http://www.graphixia.cssgn.org/2014/07/22/175-canadian-superheroics-in-jeff-lemires-essex-county/] Lemire, Jeff. The Complete Essex County. Marietta: Top Shelf, 2009. Marsden, Scott. “#176: The Roots of Canadian Identity in Lemire’s Essex County” Graphixia. 2014. [URL http://www.graphixia.cssgn.org/2014/07/28/176-the-roots-of-canadian-identity-in-lemires-essex-county/] Munro, Alice. Selected Stories. London: Vintage, 1997. Wilkins, Peter. “#173: Men Without Women: Essex County, Hockey, and Mythical Canadian Masculinity” Graphixia. 2014. [URL http://www.graphixia.cssgn.org/2014/07/02/173-men-without-women-jeff-lemires-essex-county-hockey-and-mythical-canadian-masculinity/] Wright, David N. “#174: The Line in Jeff Lemire’s Essex County: A Topographic Poetics for Comics” Graphixia. 2014. [URL http://www.graphixia.cssgn.org/2014/07/15/174-the-line-in-jeff-lemires-essex-county-a-topographic-poetics-for-comics/]

#179 Underwhelmed By Ink In Essex County

admin — Thu, 04 Sep 2014 20:21:25 +0000

I have to confess that I have struggled to write this Essex County post. The recent technical glitches behind the scenes here at Graphixia played into my hands and delayed my slot in this series. I also switched dates with Paddy as I was attending the International Association of Word and Image Studies conference the week it was due (Peter was there too, it was great to catch up IRL). All these delays meant I could hold off writing the post and quite frankly I was glad. Why? Well, I was not particularly engaged by Essex County, in fact it would be fair to say that I was underwhelmed. I was aware of the book and I might even have picked it up in a shop before but I had filed it under ‘nothing to see here’ and moved on. Unlike Hattie, the book was not sitting in my mental ‘to read’ file. So here I am, having read the book one and a half times and still feeling indifferent towards it. Was it because, as Brenna suggested, I am just not Canadian enough to get it? After all, Peter did say that it was “the most Canadian comic book” he has ever read. As Hattie mentioned there is a lot of ice hockey in this book, and I found that I got bored and easily distracted during the long hockey episodes. When I returned to reading the book to write this post I did not get past book two Ghost Stories, with its lengthy history of Lou Lebeuf’s hockey playing youth (hence the half). [caption id="attachment_3903" align="aligncenter" width="600"] A detail from p.5 of The Golem's Mighty Swing by James Sturm.[/caption] So maybe it was too Canadian, certainly if you define Canadian-ness by its relationship to ice hockey. It occurs to me as I write this that the town where I grew up is also home to Fife Flyers one of the few ice hockey teams in Scotland. Growing up I never felt any affinity to them or any desire watch them play, so perhaps my indifference to ice hockey is longstanding. However, not liking a sport does not mean that I cannot engage with a book in which it is featured. The Golem’s Mighty Swing by James Sturm is about an itinerant Jewish baseball team and it was still a great read. [caption id="attachment_3897" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Excerpt from Darwyn Cooke's introduction.[/caption] In Darwyn Cooke’s introduction he wants to distance Essex County from being called ‘comics’. He refuses to use the term and even appears to think labelling the book ‘graphic fiction’ or ‘graphic literature’ is not good enough for a book with its lofty ambitions. This is ‘Canadian Literature’ to be filed with Margarets Laurence and Atwood. This seems hyperbolic to me, there is great desire in comics to insist that any ‘serious’ work should be deemed the equivalent of great literature. Can comics not stand in their own field and have great (and terrible and indifferent) works within the medium? Although I do think that Lemire is consciously aiming for the territory that Cooke mentions. It feels like he was trying too hard to create a Great (North) American novel. If you want a book that does for comics what Margaret Atwood or Don Delillo (more baseball) does for literature then I would suggest reading David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp. This attempt at being ‘Great Literature’ is only part of the reason that Essex County does not work for me though. Listening to Dan Berry interview Woodrow Phoenix in the latest Make It Then Tell Everybody podcast made think of other reasons. Berry and Phoenix, creator of Rumble Strip and She Lives, were discussing the technicalities of comics production and the need for a book to have ‘something to say’ and not just look pretty. Phoenix stated that ‘if they have something to say, even if they have rudimentary drawing skills, then that is what I want to read.’ I generally agree with Phoenix’s comment but it made me realise that another problem I have with Essex County is that I don’t think the art in Lemire’s book is very good and this distances me even more from the story. Often when writing about a comic the reviewer discusses the plot, characterisation and storytelling without mentioning the art. Many of my Graphixia colleagues have, thankfully, touched on the art of Essex County even if only as a backhanded compliment. Peter said that Lemire’s ‘lines look like they were drawn by a really talented person drawing with his wrong hand,’ while Paddy describe his lines as being ‘ratty, like Gary Panter working on a larger scale with more breathing room.’ I would go further and say that the art is just bad. [caption id="attachment_3898" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The crow, detail from page 42.[/caption] To start with lets look at at what Dave calls ‘That frickin’ bird,’ the omniscient crow that appears throughout the book. Every time I see that crow in the book I think to myself ‘has Lemire ever seen a crow in real life?’ Lemire’s characters are a cartoony version of reality but he makes an attempt at ‘realistic’ depiction, and the detail inside school buses and hockey arenas suggests he has some real life reference, but this crow is barely even a cartoon. It is a suggestion of a crow, seemingly based on other cartoon versions of crows, and too far removed from reality to make me believe that it is an actual crow. [caption id="attachment_3899" align="aligncenter" width="225"] Ink lines in the sky in Essex County.[/caption] I am never fully convinced by Lemire’s brushwork either, it seems to betray its own making too much. We can always tell what it has been painted with. Lines in the sky appear to me to be just painted lines on a page. Unlike, say, Oliver East’s most recent black and white work in The Homesick Truant's Cumbrian Yarn where black ink scraped across the page makes me believe that there is a foreboding sky in the background of his panels. Lemire also does that illustrators trick of leaving little blobs of ink on the page but I do not understand why. Unless he thinks that is what comics illustrators do. I think there should be a reason for marks being there, rather than just style. [caption id="attachment_3901" align="aligncenter" width="338"] Detail from p.5 of The Homesick Truant's Cumbrian Yarn #1 by Oliver East[/caption] I have rambled on enough but on paper Essex County is everything I like about comics. It is an independently published black and white story about real life. It should be a straight win for me but somehow it does not work, it seems empty. In Make It Then tell Everybody Woodrow Phoenix stated that he believed that there is a contract with the reader and the creator of a comic, where the creator agrees not to waste your time. If the contract is fulfilled, even if you don’t like all of the book, it should still be worth your time to read it. Essex County is certainly not the worst comic in the world (by a margin) but I cannot decide whether that contract was fulfilled or not.

#180 Rachel Smith and Ellen Lindner on Sequential

admin — Tue, 23 Sep 2014 19:06:23 +0000

While Comixology is the most familiar app for reading comics tablets, phones, and laptops, not to mention for purchasing comics, I find myself turning to apps like Sequential when searching through Comixology becomes too overwhelming, which is often the case when looking for new, unfamiliar titles. Comixology has such a huge selection and is so dominated by superhero comics that browsing for something that isn’t necessarily in the mainstream of comics offerings can be challenging. Indeed, I often find myself swiping through publishing house after publishing house on Comixology and then giving up. I admit that I frequently just go to Fantagraphics, but prices of $15-$20 a book make taking a flier on something an expensive proposition. There’s such a thing as too much selection from my point of view, one of the reasons I prefer to go to a local shop than a giant supermarket. Sequential is the local shop to Comixology’s supermarket in the online comics sales arena. Because Sequential does not deal in conventional superhero books, works that are of interest to me tend to leap to attention on the storefront. I am able to make discoveries more easily. Sequential skews towards British creators, but also carries Fantagraphics just like Comixology. The difference is that the rest of the goods in the shop are more like those on offer by Fantagraphics: no capes and tights. Two works that I have discovered on Sequential recently are Rachel Smith’s House Party and Ellen Lindner’s Black Feather Falls. It turns out that I could have purchased Lindner’s books (1 and 2 are currently available with 3 to come) on Comixology, but I may never have found them there. When I was browsing on Sequential, up they popped, and I took a chance. It’s useful that Sequential offers chestnut reviews from Bleeding Cool and Paul Gravett to help prospective purchasers make their decisions. Smith’s House Party is not available on Comixology, but it is the kind of thing one might find in the “Submit” section of their store, along with the works of Marc Ellerby and Adam Cadwell who coordinate the Great Beast self-publishing imprint. Great Beast is itself a fine thing, offering titles not only from Smith, Ellerby, and Cadwell, but also Dan Berry and Isabel Greenberg. House Party tells the story of a trio of young adults in their twenties trying to reclaim their youth: a coming of age story of trying to put the genie of adulthood and its attendant responsibilities back in the bottle. The three share a flat, the venue of the party. Michelle, who starred in college as a writer, feels stuck in an advertising agency job; Siobhan, an artist, is working as a barista; and Neil, Michelle’s boyfriend who has aspirations to stand-up comedy, works in a bar. So far, so Millennial. Like most coming of age stories, House Party is as much about the zeitgeist as the characters. Of course, the attempt to return to the past merely serves to emphasize the inescapability of the present. House Party kills nostalgia by replaying a past event--the party of the title--that symbolizes youthfulness. Rather than revitalizating the present, the party dissolves into tawdriness, and results in the break-up of Michelle and Neil. This break-up is the freeing moment, allowing the characters to move on. In fact, Michelle’s discovery of a drunken Neil and Georgia, the lead singer from the Helveticas, in bed, allows her to return to a repressed moment: Her friend Charlie says, “He seemed really drunk...It probably didn’t mean anything...y’know?” And Michelle recalls that Neil was drunk at a house party when he declared his love for her. What “probably didn’t mean anything” was that initial declaration. The acceptance of this fact, allows Michelle to restart her creative writing. And it allows Siobhan and even Neil to move forward. It turns out that the illusory freedom of the past was in fact holding them back. This is a familiar narrative arc and moral for a coming of age story, but Smith handles it neatly. The comic has some of the qualities of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series: Georgia being the lead singer of the Helveticas, for instance, signifies a similar gap between stardom, making it, and not. Smith’s pleasurable drawing confirms a certain 21st Century British cartooning aesthetic, and certainly a Great Beast one. Her work fits right in with that of Marc Ellerby and Adam Cadwell. If you are a fan of Chloe Noonan Monster Hunter or John Allison’s excellent Bad Machinery, Rachel Smith’s work will be up your alley. As a side note, Smith has a diary web-comic called One Good Thing, which is distinguished by being a therapeutic exercise to help Smith identify positive events in her life to counteract her depression. It is worth following as an example of the possibilities of narrative drawing as therapy. I’m a fan of the autobiographical comic movement in the UK, seemingly universally inspired by James Kochalka’s American Elf, where comics are an opportunity for self-discovery. As still another side note, the last time I was drawn into an auto-bio web comic it was Kayla Hillier’s Galavant that focused quite a bit on the creator’s relationship with Adam Cadwell. Smith’s webcomic also features her relationship with Cadwell. It must be odd to be the love object in multiple auto-bio web comics, not to mention being a cartoonist drawn into others' works. Ellen Lindner’s Black Feather Falls is a genre-comic and a period comic: a 1920s murder mystery in which Tina Swift teams up with Miss McInteer to form a crime solving duo. The story is based on the white feathers from World War I that women would give to men to signify their cowardice at not signing up for the front. In this case, obviously, the feather is black and the murdered man is an apparently homeless person from a Scottish town so far north it is more Scandinavian than anything else. The murder hinges on the symbolic meaning of the black feather. As if to counteract this black/white dichotomy, Lindner splashes this comic with bright colours. The murdered homeless man was wearing a brightly coloured sweater that takes Swift and McInteer to the fictional Isle of Gannet in the Shetland Islands, so far north that the residents speak a Norse dialect. Normally, as regular readers know, I prefer black and white comics, but Lindner's intentional thematic use of colour is clever and engaging. With only two of the three issues out yet, it is impossible to comment on The Black Feather Falls in its entirety (in fact, you can read the whole story as a web comic here), but the two I've read are fine work. The pairing of TIna Swift, an American, style-conscious flapper, and Miss McInteer, a straight-laced assistant works well. The comic is like a PBS mysteries imported from Britain, injected with colour. Like House Party, The Black Feather Falls occupies rather than transforms a genre; but also like Smith’s comic, Lindner’s makes you think about the meaning of the genre in the present instance. Reading these comics on Sequential was a pretty good experience. My one gripe is that you have to choose a panel view or page view, which means that, unlike in Comixology, you can’t view the whole page, then read it panel by panel, then return to the whole page, which is my preferred method of reading online comics. But the app is otherwise a smooth running one that doesn't interfere with the reading process. At first, the selection on Sequential was limited, but it is growing fast...not to the point of being overwhelming, I hope.

#181 Let's Stop Focusing on Women in Comics

admin — Tue, 30 Sep 2014 21:54:14 +0000

I'm all for addressing the margins, but are women really in or on the margins in comics? The answer of course depends on how you want to frame the conversation. If we're talking about the representation of women in comics featuring superheroes, what we might still refer to as mainstream comics, there's a lot that one could point to as troubling--and we've pointed to it a lot. A lot. To the point where sometimes the feeling is we're pointing at it too much and thus devaluing the pointing itself--I've even done it here. It's the old if you say a word over and over again it becomes meaningless gambit. To that end, I want to put it out there that I dislike--as Marianne Moore did poetry--when comics critics have these conversations. Certainly, women cannot claim to be the only marginalized and misrepresented group in comics--how about racial minorities (or majorities) for one--even in non-mainstream comics it's tough to find a racial minority--even as a minor character. Suffice to say, I sometimes feel that focusing on the marginalization of women in comics takes away from discussions that present women in comics on their own terms. We're too busy building them a room of their own when instead we might cast our gaze at the room we already have and see how they intermingle, both positively and, depending on how one wants to see it, negatively. First up, this conversation I'm starting here is a loaded one, I know this. It's a loaded theme this round at Graphixia and I'm always wary of addressing the supposedly marginal from a supposedly privileged position because it's always dicey and fraught with the possibility of placation or misinterpretation. Disclaimer outta the way, here's a few ways to think about women in comics. If we take the representation of women out of the play--to some extent, it's been done--women are very present in the emerging mainstream of what I might term "thoughtful comics"--the ones that deal with a slice of life, issues of trauma, sickness, personal identity and the like. The books that have emerged from women in the recent history of novel-sized comics is laudable. Few remember that Dirty Plotte by Julie Doucet was Drawn and Quarterly's first book. Surely this speaks well of the position women hold on the vanguard of "avant-garde" or "literary" comics. Indeed, comics such as Marjane Satrapi's (who speaks like 40 languages) Persepolis and Alison Bechdel's (a MacArthur "Genius" Award holder for 2014) Fun Home represent foundational texts in the genre. Their influence and shaping of narratives to follow is unmistakable and has come to dominate the production of comics going forward. Issues of identity, isolation, and trauma, to name but a few, which were nested in the "boy comics" of generations past were re-addressed, replaced, and remade in a way that expanded the possibilities of story-telling, but also influenced aesthetic elements associated with comics. Satrapi's child-like scripture in Persepolis represented a shift in avant-garde comics away from the sometimes hyper-realistic or arrogant drawing of mainstream comics. More to the point, Satrapi's drawing reflected a metonymical thoughtfulness about the interplay between character, story, and art that heightened the interpretive cues in the comic. Julie Doucet's title references and foregrounds the female genitalia while at the same time the cover features her holding phallic references shooting smoke (or something...). In short, there is no shyness here, no marginalized screaming from a trapped corner. Instead, there is confidence and self-assuredness nested within a confident--or messy--drawing style through which she addresses a uniquely female perspective; it's not a reclamation of / for woman, but a commentary without reservation or connection to previous representations. Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, while certainly about her own identity, is also about the stuggles of her father's identifying as masculine. That said, the book itself is about the struggles around secret identities. The book is not about marginalized female identities, but about hidden identities--another open nod to the "mainstream" genre that's not explicit, but totally clear. The long and short of all this is to say that women in comics don't really need any defence or attention from low-lifes like me. They've got all that going on themselves. All my attention to them does is further marginalize the important contributions women have made as practitioners. Let's drop the bullshit: women have always figured prominently in the development and deployment of what we might call "serious" comics and have always, clearly, been reading the stuff boys always thought they weren't interested in. It may well be that themes like this one--the ones that focus on women in comics--are the problem. The final point I'll make is this one: can anyone imagine the state comics as art today without the support of someone like Françoise Mouly? A power player as art director for The New Yorker--putting a cartoon on the cover since forever and bringing quality exposure to the likes of Chris Ware and others--and as the energy behind the design principles that sustained avant-garde comics in Raw. One might refigure the recent "not-the-wife-of-Matt-Fraction" debacle in support of Kelly Sue DeConnick to suggest that if anyone deserves a moniker like that it's Art Spiegleman who should forever be known as "the husband of Françoise Mouly." So I call bullshit on the need to have a discussion that focuses on women in comics. Women are comics right now. The aesthetic qualities they bring to comics storytelling and style have reshaped both the serious comics of the avant-garde and crept into the narratives and style of our most popular mainstream books (recent standouts such as Sex Criminals and Hawkeye reflect the introspective and identity-focused narratives foregrounded by women--and both written by the husband of Kelly Sue DeConnick, even). So I'm not going to give women a room of their own; they're far too good to hive off in the corner and I want them in the room with everyone else, where they belong, because they're awesome--unless of course it's Lynda Barry.

#182 Necessary Memoirs: Autobiography and Women in Comics

admin — Tue, 07 Oct 2014 16:00:01 +0000

Following Dave’s polemical opening to this series on women in comics is a tough gig, as I feel whatever I write will now be judged in the context of his questioning of how useful or valuable it is to have series on women in comics at all. But I think it is valuable, and I have no doubt that this series will prove it, though it’s late as I write this, so I’m going to be painting with broad strokes here. Mostly, I agree with Dave that there is a danger here of implying that women in comics need attention from male low-lives like us, which of course, they don’t, nor do they need us to build them a room of their own – I agree with Dave entirely that I want them in the same room as everyone else. However, I think this series will reveal that women and comics have a complex relationship, and that each post will reveal some of these complexities and celebrate some of the women who have shaped comics into the art form we know and love today, which is what I’d like to do. Like Dave, I wish to engage briefly with “thoughtful comics,” such as one of my favourite graphic memoirs of late, Tomboy by Liz Prince. Tomboy is just one example of why it’s worth writing about women in comics. Liz Prince is an autobiographical cartoonist who has been a staple of Top Shelf’s excellent lists since her first book, Will You Still Love Me If I Wet The Bed?, came out in 2005. Her comics depict relationships, awkwardness, loneliness and, in Tomboy, her history with her own gender identity and physical appearance. Tomboy is a provocative, deep and engaging memoir, just like those Dave pointed to as examples of why "women are comics now," but is perhaps less possessed of the superficial qualities which make the works of Alison Bechdel and Marjane Satrapi (for example) attractive to the label of “literary comics.” Liz Prince’s visual style is more straightforward and sketchy, in keeping with some of her Top Shelf stablemates such as Jeffrey Brown, and removed from that of the supposedly literary cartoonists whose books dominate discussions of thoughtful comics, and often of women in comics too. [caption id="attachment_3946" align="aligncenter" width="531"] Liz Prince, Tomboy[/caption] It should be acknowledged that the majority of the “thoughtful comics” Dave mentioned are memoirs, and that discussions surrounding women in comics, aside from those of their portrayal in mainstream comics, thus tend towards discussions of memoir and autobiographical comics. I’d like to see this series discussing women in comics above and beyond this – women as creators of fiction, women as characters in non-mainstream fictional comics (e.g. a discussion of Enid and Rebecca as characters in Ghost World, which is covered in-depth in the recent Daniel Clowes Reader), how women as creators work and are received as part of writer-artist collaborations versus sole creators, etc. That’s just my brief wishlist, and of course I could be addressing that myself in this post, but I’d instead like to take this opportunity to recall that although “women are comics right now,” they weren’t always, and in there has been a tendency in criticism and discussion of the form (and the genre of autobiography) to canonize men at the expense of women. Robert Crumb (husband of Aline Kominsky), Chester Brown, Joe Matt, Harvey Pekar, Jeffrey Brown, Ivan Brunetti, Justin Green – all of these cartoonists are often given precedence as leaders of the autobiography genre, and they have of course made a powerful and canonical contribution to alternative comics, both with autobiographical and fictional cartooning. But there is a danger, in allowing these men and their inward-looking, masturbation-and-self-loathing-heavy memoirs to define the paradigm of autobiographical comics (and thus, by extension, what we’re calling “thoughtful comics” here), of underappreciating women’s narratives and contributions, or of marginalizing their contributions by way of placing them in their own category rather than allowing them into the room, as Dave warned against. Personally, I got into alternative comics through the famously whiny and introspective Jeffrey Brown, just as I engaged with prose books on an adult level in my teens through authors of penis-waving literature, to use Brenna’s excellent phrase. Having been a minor penis-waver myself and since having widened my perceptions of autobiographical comics and of literature as a whole and put the waving behind me, I feel the importance of acknowledging and celebrating the contributions of women, and thus I have a personal connection with the idea of a series on women in comics being a useful exercise for Graphixia. If nothing else, it’s reminded me of my previous tendency to make masturbatory male comics a paradigm and as such has reminded me to make sure I never do so. To finish, I’d like to leave you with a comics character recently created by cartoonist and TCJ Talkies podcast host Mike Dawson: Sad Man, or Sad-Boy. Dawson’s creation, existing only in his ephemeral one-shot Tumblr comics, writes a memoir entitled Sad Man Pulls at Himself which is favourably reviewed. Dawson is, to some extent, laughing at himself, an indication that male autobiographical cartoonists are aware of the pitfalls of their penis-waving. But his satire has teeth precisely because it is topical (despite referring deliberately to 2007 as a significant year for male autobiographical comics), and that, in my opinion, is proof (however small) of the necessity of a series on women in comics, and of careful consideration of women in autobiographical comics.

#183 Women... in Comics?

admin — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 05:25:56 +0000

One of the main reasons I enjoy contributing to Graphixia is that it’s a learning experience for me – though I’m an adamant collector and reader of comics, I’ve mostly relegated myself to the superhero genre or at least the major publishers in the industry. So when we pick a monthly theme that I know less about than I should, I like capitalizing on it to expand my horizons a bit. It’s not something that I recognized as being a knowledge gap before, but women in comics definitely fell into that category. While I could rattle off a few names from the superhero genre (Gail Simone, the amazing Amanda Conner), I knew that I was definitely lacking in something of substance for this month’s post that we haven’t already covered at some point. That said, I used this as an excuse to do some shopping at Vancouver’s (arguably best) comic store, Golden Age Collectibles. As it turns out, women in comics is a subject knowledge gap for me for a reason – women are vastly underrepresented in the field by an overwhelming margin. This is a fact that I knew in an offhanded way, but I’d never really understood the extent of it. Shopping through the store, I became stuck looking for even any female name on the shelf, either author or illustrator. Thinking that I was missing something, I turned to the owner of the store, someone with comprehensive knowledge of comics both past and present, asking for a few titles -or even anything - in an academic vein that I could dive into and write about. I was met with a little confusion, some discussion of the women in superhero comics I had already known about, and that was it. Heading back to the shelves, however, I asked one of the store’s female employees, Misty, the rather awkward question of where I could find some women authors because of the post I was writing (and, as Dave hinted at, there’s nothing that makes you feel like a bigger asshole than marginalizing a group by labeling it – particularly if you’re part of a privileged group that has played a part in the original subjugation). What she had to tell me was very interesting, as it turns out that Misty was the perfect person to speak with about this, being a member of the Valkyries – a collective of women working in comics shops and in the industry – advocating for a bigger voice in the market (they have a Facebook group if you’re interested, and the beginnings of a great blog at bewarethevalkyries.com). They're doing some important work there, and it looks like they're having a lot of fun besides. I couldn’t help but needle her with interview questions for a good while. The store didn’t really carry much in the way of new graphic novels created by women because, bluntly, there really aren’t that many being published – in print anyways, as webcomics appear to be where women are able to stake more of a claim as the medium evolves. Manga seems to have defied the trend as well and has a comparatively large female authorship, but in all the North American titles categorized by the more prolific known authors, the selection was entirely male. This is difficult to explain, really, as comics reading is far less one-sided in terms of sex as the media makes it out to be, with female readership being over 46% (Schenker) – one would think that the authorship would reflect this, at least in modern age publishing. There were a few graphic novels that she could name off that I’d already known about (Persepolis, Fun Home), but for the most part the topic sparked a conversation not just about how comics didn’t have adequate female representation (again, at least in print), but that representation of women had largely been co-opted by men. I thought of my experience with seeing women in comics growing up outside of the superhero genre – the biggest and most lauded was Strangers in Paradise, written by Terry Moore. Then Ghost World, written by Dan Clowes. Alison Bechdel may have changed things recently, but the past twenty years in the industry (during which comics have arguably gotten self-consciously smarter) have seen the vast majority of the portrayals of women that actually reach the comic store’s shelves being crafted almost solely by male authors. During the impromptu interview, Misty mentioned a fact I hadn’t been aware of: DC’s short lived attempt at capturing a wider female audience with its “Minx” imprint back in 2007. This series of graphic novels was an attempt to ride the wave of Persepolis, which had cracked the market of a teenaged female readership, by producing similarly thoughtful pieces on coming of age, with some of the superhero genre mixed in for good measure. However, despite being headed up by a female editorial team, the Minx titles were written and drawn almost exclusively by men, with only two titles boasting female authors. Other series that I had collected from the era, like Gotham Girls, were similarly written and drawn by men while openly attempting to welcome a female audience into the fold. Being made aware of it, it’s difficult to find this practice as anything other than insidious and, at its core, offensive. The bigger problem is that it’s getting worse: with the recent New 52 launch at DC Comics, the publisher went from 12% female creators to only 1%, with the raw numbers being 157 male creators to 3 (Hanley). Finally becoming aware of it, the numbers are a little staggering – the full breakdown can be seen here: http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/06/12/gendercrunching-the-dc-relaunch/. It’s even more problematic that the New 52 relaunch was immensely popular, and the success would indicate that these strongly gender biased practices are going to continue for at least the forseeable future – though it’s hard to imagine them getting worse. This is definitely an issue, and one that does need to be addressed. Though the conversation continued in this vein for some time, it’s not to say that I came out of the store empty handed – I picked up a copy of the superfluous, politically charged love story Blue is the Warmest Color by Julie Maroh (which I hadn’t realized was a French language graphic novel before it had been translated into the Palme d’Or winning film at Cannes) and the wonderfully experimental, beautifully illustrated examination of trauma Letting it Go written and illustrated by holocaust survivor Miriam Katin. I was originally going to write my post on one of these, but I think that doing so during this month’s topic would only serve to highlight the problem even further – I asked Misty if the store had thought of doing something similar, to have a section devoted to celebrating female authors and illustrators, and she very rightly pointed out that to create something like that would be insulting. So there seems to be a bit of a Catch 22 in discussing women in comics, and perhaps this points to what actually needs to happen: we shouldn’t discuss the topic, as doing so has, inadvertently or otherwise, further marginalized it while at the same time allowed the conversation to be hogged (and defined) by those same paternalistic, sexist business models that have carried over from the Golden Age of comics until today. So when I do eventually discuss the two excellent graphic novels I’ve noted above and which Graphixia has in a roundabout way led me to, it will rightly be solely under the heading of excellent comics’ art and storytelling. And in the meantime, I’ll probably be spending some more time reading the posts on bewarethevalkyries.com. Works Cited Hanley, Tim. “Gendercrunching the DC Relaunch.” Bleedingcool.com. 12 June 2011. Web. 13 Oct 2014. Schenker, Brett. “Market Research Says 46.67% of Comics Fans are Female.” Comicsbeat.com. 2 Feb 2014. Web. 4 Oct 2014.

#184 Girls Just Wanna Have Fun: On Lumberjanes and being Awesome.

admin — Tue, 21 Oct 2014 19:08:49 +0000

In a week when the UK’s first Comics' Laureate has been announced, and is somewhat inevitably a white man* and as 50% of the token woman quota on Graphixia (high five Brenna!). I could have weighed in with my thoughts on being a woman who reads and writes about comics, but instead I would like to talk about how I have been lured back into buying monthly comics by some awesome female characters. The first of these is Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s The Wicked and the Divine (TWTD). During the summer, during a spate of procrastinatory reading a sale on Comixology saw me purchase their entire run on Young Avengers and devour it in approximately 2 minutes flat. Hooked, I decided to pick up TWTD and I immediately fell in love with its intriguing storyline, beautiful artwork and most of all its smart, fierce, multi-dimensional women. Kieron Gillen writes characters that I wish were my friends and as I cannot possible bear to wait for the Trade Editions to come out I am now stuck (this seem too begrudging a word for a joyful experience) buying and devouring the comics monthly and then forcing my friends to read them quickly so we can dissect them together. But for this round’s theme it seems even more appropriate to talk about some kick-ass girls written and drawn by women themselves. And so on to Lumberjanes… Written by Grace Ellis and Noelle Stevenson and with art by Brooke Allen Lumberjanes is the story of five friends attending summer camp at Miss Quinzilla Thiskwin Penniguigul Thistle Crumpet’s Camp for Hardcore Lady Types. Having worked in residential Summer Schools for over ten years and being a big fan of kick-ass groups of female friends I suspected that I was going to enjoy this comic, but I didn’t realize quite how cool these particular Hardcore Lady Types were going to be. I’ve now demolished the entire series so far and I am itching to get my dirty paws on the next issue. These girls are funny, resourceful, brave, sassy and loyal and their irrepressible sense of adventure is utterly charming. As they trick Yetis, explore underground caverns, and face the campers from Mr Theodore Tarquin Reginald Lancelot Herman Crump’s Camp for Boys the five friends stick together, trust one another and have a great line in top notch putdowns for their adversaries. Jo, April, Mal, Molly and Ripley aren’t stupidly glamorous or impossibly funny or unbelievable quirky, they’re a motley crew of friends that are tall, short, skinny, less skinny some have good hair, some bad hair and others have messy hair and they go on adventures together. Which pretty much describes me and my friends! I like reading comics about people who look like my friends, talk like us (sort of) and don’t wear lycra to their nocturnal voluntary excursions. I encounter very few yetis in my daily wanderings round Glasgow and even fewer when working in Summer Schools, but I like to think that if I did need to deal with a Yeti situation I too would bribe them with some of my cookies. I’m also really enjoying reading comics that aren’t afraid to be silly. This summer I cried my way through Matilda Tristram’s Probably Nothing and have since thrust my copy at everyone I know, because I loved it (she, incidentally is another awesome Woman in Comics and I will write about Probably Nothing here very soon). However I tend to choose quite sad or 'heavy' books to read. Discovering Lumberjanes has given me a comic to read that makes me laugh and whilst I might be a little older than the intended audience the jokes, references and wit of the humour is more than enough to keep me hooked. Whilst I know all of you know that girls can be funny, resourceful, fierce, witty and strong, its really nice to see that conviction reflected in a fictional comic in a non sanctimonious fashion. I was a big fan of Marvel’s Runaways and Lumberjanes seems like a natural step on from that but without being part of a world that already has such distinct and problematic dynamics as regards the possible roles and looks occupied by women. Cliff’s Notes Version of Hattie’s Post: READ LUMBERJANES NOW! They’re sassy and cool and I wish I was their friend. P.S Read Matilda Tristram's book too! P.P.S Then go and buy The Wicked and The Divine and come and talk to me about it (and all these other books) on twitter (@HattieK) *I am actually very excited by the idea and reality of a Comics Laureate and think Dave Gibbons will do a great job. I just wish I hadn’t seen the headline “UK’s First Comics Laureate” and known without a doubt that it would be a man.

#185 Are you a Ci or a Gast?

admin — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 12:52:36 +0000

A few weeks ago Dave railed against the idea of posts about women in comics, “Let’s stop focussing on women in comics” he said, “Women are comics right now”. That’s as may be but how come only 10% of Graphixia posts are about women creators? If there are as many great comics being produced by women as men, why is Graphixia not covering them? For me the problem isn’t that we are focussing on women in comics but the fact that the default is focussing on men in comics. How about we stop focussing on men in comics? How about we stop focussing on white men in comics? How about we stop focussing on straight white men in comics? How about we stop focussing on cisgender straight white men in comics? And so on. This series of posts may go some way to redressing this imbalance but we have to keep it up, and not fall back on the default. [caption id="attachment_3983" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The first panel from GAST by Carol Swain.[/caption] Carol Swain’s GAST starts with the swallows. One panel across the top tier of a page, two swallows on a telephone line and a open sky of sparse clouds. The next two tiers are three panels each, closing in on the swallows as they build their nest on a barn. The second page is a 9-panel grid in which we see a child with binoculars watching the swallows and noting their activities. This is Helen and we will follow her (and the 9-panel grid) for the rest of the book as she investigates her new surroundings, having recently moved from London to Llanparc, a village in North Wales. Llanparc is the fictional setting of many of Swain’s stories and lies not far from the border with England, a bus trip away from Oswestry, the (very real) market town in Shropshire that draws some of her characters away from Llanparc. [caption id="attachment_3985" align="aligncenter" width="601"] Swallows in GAST by Carol Swain.[/caption] Swain’s swallows are completely believable as swallows (or gwennol in Welsh), and her pencil lines and shading allow us to be drawn into the story, unlike the inky crow in Jeff Lemire’s Essex County that I mentioned in my last post. Lemire’s bird only served to distance me from the story. Like Lemire, Swain has been described as ‘The Raymond Carver of (British) comics.’ As Paddy noted recently in reference to Carver “looking at and understanding Essex County is as much about what is not said and what is not told, as what is” and this could also be said to apply to Swain’s work. Helen’s investigations lead her to the neighbouring farm to try to find out what happened to the ‘rare bird’ mentioned by Bill the eggman. An occurrence that has caused his hens to stop laying. Swain slowly reveals details but never the whole picture and we have to read between the panels as much as Helen reads between the lines of what is said. [caption id="attachment_3989" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Silence and Helen in GAST by Carol Swain.[/caption] There is also the silence, the first chapter as Helen follows the swallows has no speech balloons, just an inference of meaning from Swain’s atmospheric pencil drawings and the occasional sentence in Helen’s notebook. With the silence there is also space. Swain evokes the wide open spaces of the North Wales border country even when the strict grid structure of the comic closes in on Helen as she walks around exploring. The silence is broken when Helen hears shouts of “Hey! Hey!” coming from a farm outbuilding, inside she is confronted by two sad-faced dogs. She stares at them for a few panels, having not quite expected what she sees. Eventually the dogs speak “Well? Got any food for us?” Helen is unperturbed by this turn of events which may initially seem odd to the reader, but like a frog being slowly boiled we accept the touches of magical realism and continue with the story. Helen is a fairly androgynous child, as many 11 year olds are, and the dogs are curious about about whether she is a ci or a gast - the Welsh terms for dog and bitch. They want to know whether Helen is male or female, and the book explores themes of gender, identity and growing up as Helen investigates the fate of the ‘rare bird’. She finds a make-up bag in a skip on the farm and is fascinated by the contents, which she logs meticulously in her notebook along with other items of her investigation and her growing Welsh vocabulary. [caption id="attachment_3996" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Helen opens the make-up bag in GAST by Carol Swain.[/caption] Helen’s inquiries takes her to the local cemetery and on a bus trip to Oswestry, journeys she undertakes on her own. There is an amount of tension in these journeys, Swain donates many panels and several pages to each, showing the time they take up in Helen’s world. This conjures up my own memories of childhood summers when days seemed much longer, a sense of endless time lost in the adult world. The tension comes from Helen’s own timetable, she needs to attend a funeral and catch a bus, and as an adult reader I worry that she will arrive in time. Time in Helen’s world is slower than time in mine. While writing about the book I don’t want to say too much about the story, I want to allow the reader the same experience that I had when reading for the first time with very little idea of what was happening. To allow the quiet power of Swain’s writing and drawing to pull the reader in. Swain has been producing comics for around 25 years. She trained as a painter and apparently turned up one day at a workshop run by Paul Gravett and just started making comics. Then she kept going, first self-publishing her own book Way Out Strips before Fantagraphics picked it up, and then producing several works such as Foodboy, which explore the worlds of people on the fringes of society, punks, skinheads, hippies, and others who don’t fit in. [caption id="attachment_3987" align="aligncenter" width="599"] Pencil textures on a night scene in GAST by Carl Swain.[/caption] Swain’s artwork is mainly black and white and made with soft pencils so that we see the texture and grain of the art on the reproduced page. She has occasionally produced strips in colour, again in pencil, but she mainly saves colour for book covers. The beautiful cover to GAST has an almost Impressionist look as it evokes autumnal colours and an overcast sky, themes of change again, in season and weather. It also brings to mind the work of Raymond Briggs, another British comics artist who comes from the art school and illustration world and makes comics without being imbued in the world of superheroes or the Beano and Dandy. Briggs' characters such as Ug, Jim and Fungus are not very far removed from Swain's such as Gar in Foodboy. Many comics artists make work that is so invested in previous generations of comic making and it is refreshing to see artists create work from the fringes, or even outside, of that sphere of influence. [caption id="attachment_3991" align="aligncenter" width="600"] UG - Boy Genius of the Stone Age by Raymond Briggs.[/caption] A work often left out of Swain’s bibliography is the once banned SKIN by Peter Milligan and Brendan McCarthy. SKIN is the story of young skinhead boy in the 1970s whose mother was given Thalidomide during pregnancy. He grows up with shortened arms “seal boy Martin ‘Atchet”. The art is by McCarthy, and Swain is credited as colourist but with the bright, swirling, pages produced in paint, pastel, crayon and pencil it is difficult to see where the line is drawn between the two occupations. One can certainly detect Swain’s hand in the textures of the pages and it would be interesting to hear how much of it is her work. She is appearing at the Cult Comics event next week as part of the Comica Festival, perhaps we will find out there. Swain’s appearance at that event is slightly odd given that her work didn’t make it into the recently published Mammoth Book of Cult Comics which it is promoting. Not many women did (less than 10%), and in his review Paul Gravett looks forward to the potential second volume “in which [editor] Ilya plans to feature more than just two women participants”. In his introduction Ilya defensively puts this down to there not being enough good work available, but maybe he wasn’t looking hard enough. He gives “honourable mentions” to a few including Myra Hancock, Kate Charlesworth, and Megan Kelso, but claims to have omitted Carol Swain (who he does deem of sufficient quality) due to the inconvenient size of her comics pages! If we don’t want to focus specifically on women creators, as Dave suggests, but include them as default then we need to change the default. I’ll start (and it is only a start) by suggesting cartoonists such as Julie Hollings, Roberta Gregory, Julie Doucet, and Jeremy Day, as well as the aforementioned, for volume two.

#186 Women in Comics Scholarship: The Issue of Tokenism

admin — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 18:32:22 +0000

In recent years, the issue of the place for women in comics scholarship has gained attention and momentum. It's very common, now, to see tweets from comics conferences weighing gender representation and celebrating the participation of women in what has traditionally been a boys-only club. (Sometimes this conversation lacks an awareness of intersectionality -- that comics scholarship has traditionally not only been a boys club, but a white anglophone boys club, but some progress in this area has been evident in recent years, too.) Before Hattie joined us, I jokingly referred to myself as the Token Uterus at the Graphixia table (now Hattie and I are Token Ovaries, collectively), and while the phrase was tongue-in-cheek and essentialist, the feeling of tokenism is something I experience in almost every interaction I have around comics scholarship. This is not true in my life as a Canadian Literature specialist, where a good share of the major thinkers are women, or in my life as a college teacher, where pedagogy is often dominated by women. But in comics, I feel it all the time. And some of the time, bro-scholars, the problem is you guys. Here are two problems I encounter with alarming frequency: 1. Stop telling me I'm the token woman on a project. You know what sucks? Reading back through the email chain of a project I've just been looped in on and seeing, "Ok, looks good but we're going to need a woman on this. Anyone know one?" Yay, I'm the one woman you know who works in this area. You didn't loop me into the project because of my insights or my writing skill, you looped me in because you realized at the last minute that you'd crafted yet another sausage fest. Don't do this. And if you do this, for the love of god, edit the email chain. I'm glad my name comes up first when you need to think of a woman. I'd rather my name comes up first when you need to think of a scholar. 2. It's not my job to find other women to write on comics for your project. If I say no to your project for whatever reason, the appropriate response is not to ask me, "Sorry to hear that. Can you suggest another woman to take your place?" If you care about women in comics scholarship beyond not wanting people to yell at you for having no women on your project, shouldn't you be reading scholarship by women? Shouldn't you have a body of academics to call on to help you decide on the best fit? Shouldn't you want more that just the first woman who popped into the head of the first women who popped into yours? I want you to care about this for real and engage and encourage a community of practice for all comers. I don't want you to only care about women in comics scholarship when you think someone is counting. Listen: I'm a publication-hungry junior scholar. I want to work with you. I want to join your project. I want to write for you. But I also think that my body of work entitles me to the respect of my colleagues beyond my ability to make up the numbers on a project. My Token Uterus is attached to a brain; it would like some of your attention, too. I'm glad you're paying attention to the issue of gender in comics scholarship. Now stop being insulting about it.

#187 'Yet Another Piece of Women's Autobiographical Rubbish': Gendered Framing and the Comics of Judith Vanistendael

admin — Tue, 18 Nov 2014 22:30:07 +0000

Judith Vanistendael is arguably the most famous graphic novelist from Flanders, perhaps sharing the niche with Brecht Evens and Olivier Schrauwen. Her prominent position on the international scene as a widely translated author, nominated several times at Angoulême and this year for the Eisner Awards, is closely related to changes in the Flemish community in Belgium. In the last decades, Flemish comics have joined the 'graphic novel phenomenon' under the impulse of new alternative publishers as Bries and Oogachtend, high-quality comics-focused formations at art schools such as Sint-Lukas, and the financial support of the Flemish Literature Fund through grants and subsidies for translation. Vanistendael's career is not only a neat example of these aspects; her debut work also displays the somewhat stereotypical traits expected from graphic novels: translated into English as Dance by the Light of the Moon, her two-volume De maagd en de neger (2007-2009) is a semi-autobiographical narrative about the love relationship between the young Sofie and Abou, a Togolese political refugee in Brussels. A fluid black-and-white drawing style, an autobiographical narrative where political and personal matters are narrowly intertwined, and the 'token woman' (cf. Brenna's post): Vanistendael had everything to become the Flemish Marjane Satrapi. However, a close look directly reveals that, beyond their affinities in terms of themes, their approach to visual storytelling is radically different. The framing of Vanistendael as the “Flemish Satrapi” implies a problematic gendered categorization that plays up the autobiographical, thematic and real-life contents, simplifying what makes her work truly interesting. As Dave recalls, women have played a pivotal role in redefining comics in both stylistic and thematic terms, producing compelling slice-of-life narratives dealing with issues of trauma and identity. Indeed, Satrapi's Persepolis and Bechdel's Fun Home are canonized memoirs that have clearly set the tone for the graphic novel as a loosely-defined genre. Both in Europe and North-America, autobiography quickly became a dominant trend as it posited comics not only as objects made by auteurs but also promised an apt confrontation with the real contrasting with the supposedly escapist adventures of mainstream comic books (cf. Beaty's “Autobiography as Authenticity”). Although I would agree with Paddy that women autobiographical narratives provide a welcome and necessary counterpoint to the masturbatory and self-loathing tendency illustrated by Robert Crumb, Joe Matt, and the like, I do not really recognize the power struggle he sketches between these two trends. In fact, Bechdel and Satrapi have had such a resounding success and pivotal role in establishing graphic novels in a broad cultural sphere that I would rather go with Dave in saying that “women are comics right now.” But, given this crucial role, there is rather a danger for too strong an association between women comics artists and autobiographical narrative, as if women came into comics only through the recent development of this genre. In fact, the research of Trina Robbins – culminating in her recent Pretty in Ink (2013) – is invaluable for considerably expanding the historical relationships between women and comics. If women loom large over the graphic novel scene, this does not mean in any way that they have been systematically kept at bay until the 1990s. However, given the prominent position of women cartoonists as Bechdel and Satrapi, and the critical attention paid to them (cf. Chute's Graphic Women), women's comics tend to be more quickly framed in terms of autobiography – a genre that is now increasingly perceived as stereotypical for the graphic novel. This is clearly expressed in the foreword to first volume of Vanistendael's De maagd en de neger, a comics page by Vanistendael's teachers at Sint-Lukas, Johan de Moor and Nix, who recall their first encounter with her work. Their first reaction sounds “alweer van dat vrouwelijk autobiographic geneuzel” (something like 'yet another piece of women's autobiographical rubbish'), but they quickly see more to it than the usual shtick. Although their comment is ironical, it highlights the somewhat overbearing emphasis on autobiography in comics today, but dangerously tends to relegate that genre to clichéd stories by women. What their foreword more insightfully reveals, is that Vanistendael's work cannot be limited to a narrow (and sexist) stereotype of women autobio, while recognizing that she undoubtedly works in the context of autofiction. The reception of her work has quickly adopted the autobiographical dimension of her work in order to emphasize real-life concerns, shifting the attention away from the formal complexity of the work and towards its author. This attention is at least partly due to the fact that Judith's father, Geert van Istendael, is himself a renowned Belgian journalist and writer, famous for an essay on the country's labyrinthine structure. The story, which focuses on the father's mixed feeling about his daughter's relationship with a political refugee, had of course the potential to draw media-attention to polemical issues. But this father-daughter relationship is interesting in more than one aspect. The first volume of De maagd en de neger actually is an adaptation of “Berich uit de Burcht” a short story written by Geert van Istendael about precisely the same subject, but the autobiographical dimension of which remained unknown to the public. Judith Vanistendael's comic is, so to speak, her answer to her father's story in two volumes: the first one adapts the short story, told from the father's perspective, while the second adopts Sofie's own viewpoint. Narratologically speaking, the work takes avail of the split narrative channels to introduce a polyphony resisting Lejeune's author-character-narrator unity, in a manner that recalls Guibert's comics. The first volume is not 'merely' an adaptation: the text is entirely borrowed from the short story, but the drawings also participate in the storytelling, and the style is uniform across both books. The 'mute' sequence of the park-bench exemplify this contribution, demonstrating how drawing style and page-layout make it something radically different, and through which another voice transpires. In the second volume, after a reception that directly confronted her with her own life-experience, she went to emphasize fictional framing device by depicting Sofie as a storytelling character. The book opens up on a bed-time “Once Upon a Time” tale, where textual and visual tracks tell the same story, but with different shades and tones: a telling example is the way the sex scene is summarized into a kiss. Vanistendael's comics is thus a co-mixture (as Spiegelman would say) of her father's and her own artistic production, resulting in a fascinating and intricate but fluid narration, and one that differs from usual autobio comics. As such, it also anticipates her praised graphic novel When David Lost his Voice (2013), in which the narrative is resolutely dialogic and polyphonous. This technique, of course, is not only a formalist artifice, but an attempt at depicting the psychological and political complexities of love and immigration. Framing her work as a narrowly defined autobiographical narrative does no right to the talent of the author as an artist, and participates in a gendered logic that ultimately reduces the scopes of women's contribution to the comics form. Works Cited Beaty, Bart. “Autobiography as Authenticity.” A Comics Studies Reader. Eds. J. Heer and K. Worcester. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. 226-235. Chute, Hillary. Graphic Women. Life-Writing and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Robbins, Trina. Pretty in Ink. North American Women Cartoonists 1896-2013. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2013. Van Istendael, Geert. “Berich uit de burcht.” Veldwerk in Vlaanderen. Amsterdam: Atlas, 2000. 11-44. Vanistendael, Judith. De maagd en de neger. Papa en Sofie. Amsterdam: Oog&Blik/De Bezige Bij, 2007. Vanistendael, Judith. De maagd en de neger. Leentje en Sofie. Amsterdam: Oog&Blik/De Bezige Bij, 2009. Vanistendael, Judith. Dance by the Light of the Moon. London: SelfMadeHero, 2010. Vanistendael, Judith. When David Lost his Voice. London: SelfMadeHero, 2013.

#188 You're Having A Giraffe, Mate: Bruce Paley and Carol Swain's Giraffes in My Hair: A Rock 'n' Roll Life

admin — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 08:09:35 +0000

To kick off the next Graphixia sequence in which we pair up to discuss the work of interesting teams, Damon and I have chosen Bruce Paley’s memoir Giraffes in My Hair: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Life, drawn by Carol Swain, as our text. We found the book interesting because the title promises a kind of rock star grandeur, when in fact the book presents him as a fairly ordinary person with some interesting, period-related stories to tell in which he often appears on the margins rather than central to the action. This is not to say the book is a failure; rather Paley seems to play up his marginal status that Swain illustrates in symbolic ways. Our strategy was to pick particular pages and discuss them, with each of us writing about the page we selected and perhaps adding commentary to what the other wrote. Generally, our themes are Paley’s missing the main event of any given story--not making The Who concert in time, not going to Vietnam, not resolving the conflict with his father--and Swain’s depiction of it and comics intertextuality. Art by Carol Swain unless noted.

Page 13 (Peter)

This page sums up the book for me in terms of the way it represents Paley’s inability to participate in the big event. He has been hitchhiking from Fort Wayne, Indiana to Springfield Illinois 250 miles away to hear The Who play live. The old man with whom he hitches a ride has a breakdown and by the time he gets another ride, he is too late to hear anything but the strains of “You Are Forgiven” as he climbs the fence. Once he’s over, he hears “Good Night” and that’s it; his mission to hear his favourite band comes a cropper. I particularly like the last three panels of page 13 that show him getting closer and closer to the fairground fence. The lyrics and musical notes rise up like smoke from the distance. The final panel shows him hanging from the fence. It’s a great panel to end the page on because I can imagine Paley being stuck there, excluded from the scene. When we turn the page to see that he has been successful climbing the fence, Paley’s triumph is short-lived: The next panel we see “Thank You Illinois!” and the concert is over. We don’t get to see The Who either. Paley’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll” life is just this sort of caper. The actual Rock ‘n’ Roll is always on the horizon, never actually in the present moment so that Paley can experience it. I prefer to read the book’s words and art as knowing that Paley is always just missing out. It’s not a failure of the book in any way, but its point.

Pages 25-26 (Peter)

[caption id="attachment_4049" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Swain channels Jack Kirby in her renditions of the Silver Surfer and Galactus.[/caption] The point of this segment is to illustrate both Paley’s enthusiasm for comics and his alienation from the world around him. As we can see, Swain is quite faithful in her redrawing of Kirby’s original panel. There are a couple of things to point out here. First, this is a version of comics intertextuality in the book that matches the literary intertextuality elsewhere: Kerouac, for instance. It gives us a contrast between the type of comic this book is and the typical super hero comic. The Silver Surfer’s dilemma is a kind of cosmic existentialist crisis, while Paley’s is more mundane: spurned by his father rather than Galactus, Paley imagines blasting the neighborhood with his super powers. But the second and most interesting aspect of this segment occurs when Paley talks about waiting for for the next issue of Silver Surfer to come out, but it never does. Above a panel that shows Paley looking at a car that seems to be driven by his father who has kicked him out of the house, we see the following in a text box: “I guess some things are never resolved.” This lack of resolution covers the whole book, not just the missing Silver Surfer issue or the relationship between Paley and his father. The overarching feeling of reading Giraffes in My Hair is that of waiting for a climactic moment that will resolve Paley’s life. But that never happens. And I think that is what Paley is using the autobiographical form to express: a set of incidents that are loosely related but that don’t necessarily cohere into a plot the way that we expect from a piece of fiction. Damon: The influence of the Beats and superhero comics also brings to mind another comic that channels these inspirations, but in a very different way. Unstable Molecules: The True Story of Comics’ Greatest Foursome, written by James Sturm and with art by Guy Davis and Robert Sikoryak, purports to be a biography of the real-life people that were the basis for The Fantastic Four. The characters squabble, much as they do in Kirby and Lee’s original, and Johnny Sturm/Storm leaves the group in anger, this time under the spell of a beat poet Joey King (allusions to Jack Kerouac and Jack Kirby but also, I like to think, King’s name gives us a clue that Sturm’s biography is fiction, Jo-King, geddit?). As Johnny joins the beatniks in midnight beach party revels, his left-behind friend, nerdy comic book fan Richard Mannelman, imagines himself killing the beatniks in the style of a 1950s comics. A Nick Fury-esque figure gunning down ‘every last stinking beatnik’ much like Paley destroys his neighbourhood. [caption id="attachment_4046" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Art by Robert Sikoryak.[/caption]

Page 34 (Damon)

On the first page of the strip The Draft we see further intertextual engagement in Paley’s story, and one of the few places where Paley interacts positively with his father; Paley senior ‘wisely’ tells his son not to get drafted and sent to Vietnam. This panel is placed between two panels showing Swain’s recreation of two of the most famous images from the Vietnam War, Eddie Adams’ photograph of Nguyễn Văn Lém being shot in the head, and ‘The Terror of War’ by Nick Ut, showing children running from a napalm attack. Swain’s soft pencil marks recreating the clouds from the bombing. In the next panel Nixon is shown having an idea to restructure the draft system with the classic trope of a light bulb appearing above his head. This, and other emanata later in the story sit oddly within Swain’s art, which always seems more rooted in reality, but they provide narrative shortcuts where the art is more illustrative of the narration boxes rather than telling it’s own story. Swain’s art also compares Nixon’s new draft lottery to a game of Monopoly where some pass directly to Vietnam (without collecting $200) and others receive a ‘Get out of jail free’ card. Peter: We are finding that this “slice of life” realist comic is in fact highly symbolic and metaphorical, particularly when Swain is drawing moments of Paley’s life that have a more general meaning. These are times when specific experience turns into general significance.

Page 101 (Peter)

I was interested in this page because a) it is another example of comics intertextuality, echoing the Silver Surfer panels and b) that intertextuality uses the genre of the horror comic to represent Paley’s heroin addiction. The only colour page in the book, it parodies the EC comics covers. True life horror is converted into the register of fictional horror, which is usually outlandish and implausible. HP Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe. On this cover, Bruce is bald on top, suggesting a much older Bruce than we have seen up to now. He looks gaunt and ill. The full moon is out, a couple of junkies lurch and sway in the background in front of a boarded up tenement. Three circular panels on the left of the page list the characters. “The Hand” in the first panel is the horror element, something like the creature under the sidewalk or the beating heart under the floorboards. The hand is the disembodied body part of the dealer who receives the cash and dispenses the heroin. While Bruce’s addiction is generally not portrayed as a horror story at all--Bruce claims to kick heroin fairly straightforwardly--it is framed by elements from the horror comic: in the last couple of panels a figure of death is shown accepting money for drugs and grabbing the wrist of its victim. This kind of framing is something new in the book, which up to now has been in the mode of autobiographical realism--even the Silver Surfer panels can be explained away as Bruce simply explaining his love of the comic. It is perhaps a suggestion of what kind of story this book could have been if Bruce had not kicked heroin.

Page 123 (Damon)

In our discussion of many of the pages in this book we have highlighted what I see as a tension between the authors, and their taste in comics. As you might expect of an American who went on to run a comic shop in London, Paley’s taste seems to run to the mainstream superhero and horror comics that he grew up with, whereas Swain, who is a generation younger and grew up in Wales, comes from the indie and art comic scene. In his history of Escape magazine Paul Gravett talked of ‘the thrill ‘discovering’ Carol Swain drawing her first ever magical comic at an Escape workshop’. This juxtaposition of the authors’ interests in comics plays out on the pages with Swain tackling some Kirby artwork and channeling EC comics for a chapter title page. However, there are many moments where Swain seems free of this tension, and it allows her storytelling skills to come to the fore unencumbered by emanata or superhero references. Many of the dialogue scenes, and quiet moments of travel seem to be ‘pure’ Swain. One such scene is the last page in Needs Must When the Devil Drives where Paley and his friends Andy and Eva are wandering around New York in the worst blizzard for 20 years trying to score some heroin. Most of the usual dope places are closed but they eventually find some enterprising dealers who are lowering a bucket to the streets with the drugs to avoid going out into the snow. The three friends stand around discussing what to order as the snow falls around them in large fluffy flakes. The flakes appear like moth eaten holes in Swain’s drawings. The panels are mostly devoid of backgrounds emphasising just how white and bereft of life the world around them has become. In the second last panel the reader looks down on the white square with Paley and co staring up as they watch the bucket float up to the dealers. They are struggling to comprehend Andy’s decision not to buy drugs after their long quest in the snow. In the last panel Swain beautifully sketches in some buildings in soft pencil behind the snowflakes, Andy is walking away as Paley concludes ‘Junkie logic - go figure’. Works Cited: Paley, Bruce (writer) and Carol Swain (artist). Giraffes in My Hair: A Rock 'n' Roll Life. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2009. Sturm, James (writer), Davis, Guy (artist), Sikoryak, R. (artist), and Vrana, Michel (colourist). The Fantasic Four: Unstable Molecules: The True Story Of Comics’ Greatest Foursome. New York: Marvel Comics, 2003.

#189 OK, This "Looks" Bad, But...

admin — Thu, 18 Dec 2014 19:56:29 +0000

This post features an Easter Egg--a hidden clue to its complete reading. We're riding the edge of the wave here, but trying to think about the hidden aspects of collaboration; the visual verses the unseen. So, half of this post is hidden from view unless you search for it. It's not hard to find; one hint: you need to view what's hidden in the page--not simply what's visible--the "source." Collaboration, in comics as elsewhere, helps us to reframe our static perspectives – Graphixia has helped me do this a lot by getting me to approach comics in a more academic way through the suggestions offered by my peers, putting more esoteric fare in my hands than I’m normally gravitated towards. Rarely though do I need someone to tempt me to read a superhero book, as I read practically everything I can get my hands on (I’ve written about my disturbingly large collection here before). But then Dave started writing about Hawkeye and suggesting it to others. Personally, I’ve never been a fan of the character. Hawkeye has existed in many iterations since his first appearance in Tales of Suspense in the 60’s. Mostly, he was the Iron Man nobody wanted, out of place on a team of heroes imbued with fantastic powers and with writers unsure of what to do with him. What good is an archer against hordes of aliens, against villains with mystical powers – against, very often, gods? There was perhaps a certain everyman potential about him, but even this was masked early on by writers stamping his carnival-esque character as a womanizing alcoholic, likely because if they couldn’t emphasize his powers to make him interesting, at least they could amplify some titillating flaws. Regardless, I collected Hawkeye in the 80’s and early 90’s with his four issue mini-series (a way of testing if the market will bear a longer running solo title. It didn’t), and his eight issue attempt at a run in the early 00’s. I still have all the issues, but I never read them more than once. The only time that Hawkeye ever became interesting for me was when Brian Michael Bendis got ahold of him during his run on New Avengers, but even then the only way to draw people in to his character was to kill him then completely reinvent him – he had Hawkeye pose as a different masked, martial-arts based character, Ronin, for a large portion of the series, with the big reveal that it was Hawkeye who had been masquerading as a ninja ultimately coming as a bit of a letdown once he went back to the quiver and rejoined the team. He immediately went back to being second string. So, history dispensed with, when I saw Hawkeye reappear on my monthly list of potential new titles, I skipped it altogether. When Dave wrote his superfluous Pizza Dog article, I got a little more intrigued. When I saw that the comics had jumped in value quite a bit I kicked myself. And when I finally picked up and read the first trade (with the clerk telling me “oh Hawkeye! That’s a great series”), I was more than a little irritated that I’d let my previous experience with the character get in the way of seeing him through what turned out to be a provocative new lens. And comics has a way of doing this, experimenting with characters who have fallen out of favour by adding new creative teams (to make a recommendation of my own, the currently running Silver Surfer helmed by heavy hitters Dan Slott and Mike Allred exemplifies exactly the same scenario). And, to be fair, this isn’t Hawkeye. It can barely be called Clint Barton. Matt Fraction and David Aja getting their hands on the old, dusty franchise character were given rarely offered complete creative control over him; and really, when everyone expected the book to fail given the source material, why not dabble in a way that really allows for the team’s collaborative voice to come through? They’re seemingly aware of the challenge as well - the repeated first line of every issue, “Okay, this looks bad,” punningly references whatever awkward situation has been constructed for Hawkeye but also working with the character himself, the two creators tasked every issue with capturing their readers’ interest with no one’s favorite Avenger. As Fraction himself stated, "It's the book that should not exist, so why not take the chances and do the experimenting?" And have they ever – from near silent issues told from the perspective of Hawkeye’s rescued dog to issues told entirely in sign language, Hawkeye has gone out of its way to highlight the talents of both writer and artist, almost to the degree that you have to admit that the character is really just along for the ride – we see this expressed literally again and again, as he’s picked up in different vehicles and driven around by Young Avenger Kate Bishop, then by SHEILD, then by the mob, then offscreen by Tony Stark, always totally confused and directionless. I’ve never seen a comic that so obviously and actively refuses to let the character have any agency whatsoever, nearly breaking the fourth wall at points in order to do so. This is, perhaps, a way of indicating that whatever Hawkeye turns out to be, they’re willing to own it for better or worse. Fraction’s comedic turn with his tracksuit dracula “bros” (one can’t help but think this is a current pop culture reference to Pewdiepie and his “bro army”) and his consistent gesturing towards the zaniness of the life of a superhero as told from the perspective of the regular guy makes us engage more with Fraction than with Clint – again, he’s always getting himself into trouble, avoiding problems and never quite knowing what to say. Unlike most superhero comics, in Hawkeye instead it’s the situation rather than the character that drives the plot, and they emphasize this by even having him miss his targets in close range target practice. Clint does have brief moments of heroism, but really, he could be any of us. Very frequently he tells his neighbors to ignore the fact that he’s “Hawkguy.” It’s almost as if, throughout, Fraction has found a way to write anything but a superhero comic while making sure that it sells as it’s under the Marvel brand name. Even when he does introduce the rest of the Marvel Universe, he dispenses with it immediately by first having Clint black out for the duration of the fight then by having him take a vacation. Looking at the same scene, Aja’s gritty but still simplified style, reminiscent of David Mazzucchelli’s Batman run, compliments the refusal to adhere to the genre as he pans back from action shots to make the even the violence look, in a way, pathetic. Barton is always getting hurt, as we rarely see heroes suffer (a broken pelvis? With three weeks’ recovery? Ow), but Aja draws it in such a way to emphasize Clint’s fragility – we’re deprived of the momentous “pows” and “biffs” of the superhero fight scene, as Clint is beaten without fanfare in small frames, often caught off guard, frequently being knocked immediately unconscious. As acknowledged in the many, many podcasts and interviews with the pair (here's one), Fraction is playing to Aja’s talents as they play with every facet of the medium, experimenting with transitions, hiding gags throughout and generally having a lot of fun. And if Hawkeye is about anything, it’s this – giving a pair with the credentials behind them a low stakes outlet to experiment with style, with dialogue and with content without potentially upsetting Marvel’s broader fanbase. They play to the mythos only as much as it suits them, which is likely why is hasn’t ostracized readers unfamiliar with the genre, which is likely why Dave found it so appealing and why I was averse to it at first. But though this has been something of an experiment and though it’s not likely to be canon anytime soon, they’re opening up the door for more creativity to be brought to the superhero comic, providing it with an infusion of vitality that, as we’ve noted at graphixia, is much needed if they’re to remain relevant to a broader audience.

#190 The All-Star Graphixians Read All-Star Superman

admin — Wed, 24 Dec 2014 13:37:48 +0000

Hey, Hattie -- So I thought we could do this a little more conversationally than the boys have done so far. Maybe in a series of notes back and forth? Epistolary-styles? I don’t mind doing the uploading and formatting if that’s easier on you. I think, since this is the last post before Christmas, we should keep it casual and just pretend we’re chatting about All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely over a gin and tonic somewhere in Leeds. So with that, I’ll start by asking you: what did you think? I know you’re not usually a capes-and-tights gal, so I’m thrilled you signed on to read this one with me. Morrison and Quitely are my favourite duo working in comics, hands down. So: initial thoughts? xo B Cheers Dr B, I have to admit I struggled a bit. For about the first thirty pages I kept muttering to myself “But how has Lois not realised that Clark Kent is Superman and Superman is Clark Kent, is she really stupid?” But then, almost despite myself, I started to quite enjoy the book. I was worried that the fact I have read precisely ZERO other Superman comics might cause me a few issues but it really didn’t. I am sure there are lots of things I didn’t pick up on but I didn’t feel too much of an outsider as I read the book. As for Morrison and Quitely, a quick scan of a an online encyclopedia confirms that this is the first Morrison and Quitely comic I have ever read. I had a few niggles when I started reading it but we can come back to that later… So, how about you? What were your initial thoughts? One of the reasons I floated this by you is because I think it stands alone well and is a good comic for people who don’t think they’re capes-and-tights people. Morrison is really good at characters who are flawed. I never liked Superman comics as a kid for the same reason I never liked Batman -- everything seemed too easy when your superpowers are EVERYTHING and BEING RICH, respectively. When I came across this run, I was thrilled, because Superman is so fallible here. He can be wounded. There is something so compelling about a Superman who can be wounded, don’t you think? Absolutely, and I think like you this was one of the reasons why I struggle with Batman and Superman comics and why I enjoyed this so much. After I got over my frustration at how obtuse Lois Lane appears to be it was definitely this new vulnerability that kept me engaged. I particularly enjoyed the parts from Episode Six (and here’s where I will indulge in some spoilers) where the multiple different Supermans(men?) come together to work as a team. I found myself very moved by the death of Jonathan Kent in a way that I really did not expect to be coming into this book. I found seeing that emotional vulnerability playing out against the story of his physical vulnerability particularly effective. Are there any sections or episodes you really enjoyed above others? My favourite bit in the whole book is actually the second page of Episode 1, where we get the entire backstory of Superman in four panels. I thought that was really expertly done. It also acknowledges Superman’s role in certainly North American culture -- no one doesn’t know where Superman comes from, and it’s a remarkably consistent narrative compared to a character like Wolverine for example. So why rehash it? Four panels, eight words. That page, to me, is a really magical examples of comics doing what comics do best: using the visual to tell the story to best effect. That segues pretty nicely into talking about the collaboration between Morrison and Quitely, maybe? What did you think of how they worked together on this one? For me, the biggest tell that these two guys are totally in sync is Clark Kent. Have you ever seen a more bumbling, frumpy, loser-ish Clark Kent? This is the first comic where I’ve ever bought the secret identity malarky because it’s clear from Quitely’s careful development of the character -- perfectly in line with Morrison’s story -- that Clark Kent has to work really flipping hard to stay incognito. It’s not just glasses; it’s the way he holds himself in space. Very effective. I have to admit that within the first few pages I was complaining to a friend about how much I disliked Quitely’s art and Morrison’s dialogue. Having finished the book I changed my mind completely about the former and mostly about the latter. I still find Morrison’s dialogue a bit heavy and clunky at points, but re-reading parts before writing this post helped change my mind further, in particular the scene where Lois and Superman are having dinner and discussing his big identity reveal. However I could have done without it being quite so expositional at crucial moments, there are ways they could have conveyed the same information visually or with more nuanced dialogue. As for Quitely’s art, I particularly enjoy the way he uses the panels and their position on the page to reinforce and reflect what is happening within their confines. Just occasionally a panel is slightly off kilter or drops a bit and you barely notice it but it makes the pages so full of movement and fills me with joy about the possibilities of comics. I’ve just gone back to look out for examples of your point above, I hadn’t consciously remarked on it before but now you’ve pointed it out I just want to squeal with how perfectly it is done! Yay! I also really like how Quitely can move us one moment, like with the way Clark Kent’s face falls through the eulogy, and then give us broad slapstick old-school imagery, like on the Bizarro planet (how much did you laugh watching Superman try to control the bizarros?). It’s not a perfect comic (is there such a beast?), but I’m genuinely impressed by the way Morrison’s slightly stilted style and Quitely’s square jaws and reserve manage to evoke the Golden Age of comics while still crafting a story that feels utterly contemporary. We’d better wrap this up before the boys tell us off for being late. Any final thoughts? Not much other than a thank you for pushing me to read something outside my usual taste, I had forgotten how much I do enjoy reading Superheroey comics and have a distinct tendency to avoid DC Comics in general, so this has been an ace experience all round! Score one for collaboration! And Merry Happy to all our Graphixia readers.

#191 The Graphixia 2014 Superlatives Post

Grayb — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 15:59:42 +0000

Here are our bests and worsts of 2014. Happy New Year, Graphixia readers!

Best Comic Published in 2014 Brenna Afterlife with Archie: This is so very well done, and so surprisingly subversive. Very pleased to be into Archie again! Dave The first four or so issues of Sex Criminals: This comic started off great and then fizzled with all the hype. Ah well. Peter Hip Hop Family Tree Volume 2 by Ed Piskor: Excellent example of comics as cultural history. Scott "Sandman: Overture" - Neil Gaiman, J H Williams III: Can't not vote for this series - Gaiman's had time to reflect on his universe and give it an inspired and long awaited origin, and Williams' art is worth the delayed releases. Hattie The Wicked and the Divine: Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie write excellent comics and women and I thoroughly enjoyed the first story arc of this series. I can't wait to see where this goes next! Damon Gast by Carol Swain: Swain's charcoal realism continues to enchant, with just a hint of the magical. Contains talking dogs. Ernesto Creeping Death from Neptune: The Life and Comics of Basil Wolverton Vol. 1: Love his work. Paddy A Body Beneath by Michael Deforge: Excellent collection of Deforge's Lose comics, which allows the reader to chart his growth as a cartoonist and the burgeoning of his remarkable talent for absolute horror and gut-wrenching surrealism working in tandem with bare, human emotion. One of the most important cartoonists living today IMO. Benoit Arsène Schrauwen by Olivier Schrauwen: First thick graphic novel by Schrauwen. It's playfully not autobiographical nor documentary, its formal experiments are dazzling, and the absurd and nonsensical humor is weirdly hilarious. Terrific read and major milestone in the cartoonist's oeuvre.

Best Read of 2014 Brenna Seconds: It turned out to be everything I hoped it would be: the unexpected fun of Scott Pilgrim, and the emotional depth of Lost at Sea. A gem. Dave Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow by Brian Fies: A little under the radar pick from me, as usual. But a great book. Peter The Bad Doctor by Ian Williams: Great to see the mind behind graphic medicine publish his own book to such aplomb. Scott "Multiversity" - Grant Morrison, Various artists (but finally Frank Quitely!): This is Morrison at his absolute best, showing off his comprehensive knowledge of comics' history interwoven with breaking all the walls he can. Totally caught me off guard. Hattie Matilda Tristram "Probably Nothing": If it doesn't sound too weird I thoroughly enjoyed this book about Tristram's experiences of pregnancy, cancer and having cancer whilst being pregnant. Funny, insightful and moving it was definitely my favourite thing I read this year. Honourable mention goes to Ian Williams' The Bad Doctor because Graphic Medicine is kicking arse this year. Damon She Lives by Woodrow Phoenix: A one-off giant-sized work of art. Pure comics storytelling. A must read, but due to it's nature few have. It was my pleasure to be able to read it again and again at Woodrow's performance readings at Dundee Comics Day. Ernesto Terms of Service, by Michael Keller and Josh Neufeld: Excellent Al Jazeera America production of comics journalism focusing on big data and privacy. Paddy Basewood by Alec Longstreth: Beatifully produced hardback graphic novel collecting the entire Basewood story from Longstreth's Phase 7 comics. An epic, punchy and sweet fantasy, tinges of Bone about it, and with unbelievable cross-hatching. It was drawn way bigger than on the page. Benoit The Gumps (1929) by Sidney Smith: That is the Library of American Comics Essentials edition, covering the full 1929 year of the Gumps continuity strip. I kept myself from reading more than three or four strips a day, but it was particularly hard to restrain the drive to read it all in one go.

Most Disappointing Read of 2014 Brenna None: In a year that saw the publication of a Fraggles comic, what are the odds I'm going to have a bad time? Dave Seconds (Or, The Opposite of Whatever Brenna Writes in "Best Read" Category) (I was even gonna put Saga in here until I read what Brenna had down.): I know this will kill Brenna, but whatever. Lame book. (Dave is always wrong. -Ed) Peter Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? By Roz Chast: A lot of people put this book on their top ten list. I found it kind of exploitative and mean. Scott Tie: "Original Sin" and "Axis," Marvel's big crossover summer events. DC's weekly "New 52: Future's End" is pretty rushed and lazy too. Cash grabs all: Boring as all get out. Instead of having a well thought out, integrated summer event, Marvel had two that it just phoned in. "Axis" is essentially just an eight issue fight. Hattie Essex County: I just did not get it, and chronicled that at length on this very site. I've had to stop claiming to be vaguely Canadian because I feel I have failed some kind of test. (Moose license revoked. -Ed) Damon I am having no truck with negativity this year. (Also, I assume, because of the Fraggles. -Ed) Ernesto None: It's sad but these days I can't afford to read stuff I don't know I am 90% likely to enjoy. Sad, I know. Paddy If journalism is allowed in this category, this crap: Just because I read it yesterday and it pissed me off, for obvious and tweeted reasons. (I responded over at Panels. -Ed) Benoit None.

Most Important Comics Headline of 2014 Brenna Tamaki cousins winning the Governor General's Award for This One Summer: After all the drama in not crediting the artist last time, this is a huge win for mainstream understanding of comics. Dave Storylines shakeup at Marvel / the ascension of Image Comics as a big player: You have to wonder how long this Marvel shakeup will go on, and whether they're serious. Qithout question Image is serious. Just one hit book after another from them this year--personal judgements about those books aside. Peter Koyama Press goes digital with Sequential: Only Drawn and Quarterly left to go digital now. Scott The highest recorded price ever for a comic in Action Comics #1 - $3.2 MILLION for a CGC 9.0 unrestored. Crazy: Wow. Seriously - get out of the stock market. Buy high end blue chip collector's comics. They outperform nearly every other investment consistently. (Scott consistently makes me aware that I am not only bad at comics, but also money. -Ed) Hattie I seem unable to remember what happened last week in Comics and didn't make it to Comics Unmasked so it feels wrong to choose that! Damon British Library stages UK's biggest comics exhibition:Comics Unmasked curated by Paul Gravett and John Harris Dunning was a resounding success and inspired many debates among comics fans and scholars. Ernesto Comics Unmasked at the British Library: Good news all around. Paddy The whole conversation around Lizz Hickey's crowdfunding comic: A lot of conversations have happened this year about cartoonists, money, living wages, art, audiences and the expectations surrounding all these material and abstract things, in the sphere of independent comics, at least. Hickey's comic was a high point for this conversation, but it's worth thinking about this too. Benoit Creation of the États Généraux de la Bande Dessinée: Various comics professionals sit down to critically reflect on the economic situation of the medium.

Biggest WTF Comics Moment of 2014 Brenna Pyongyang adaptation shut down over North Korea threats: The Steve Carrell spy-thriller adaptation of Guy Deslisle's comics-journalism work is shut down in the wake of the Sony hack by North Korea. NOTHING ABOUT THAT ISN'T WEIRD. Dave Fiona Staples only woman to win an Eisner in 2014: Really? That's it? For SAGA!?!? Peter The success of Comics Unmasked at the British Library: Another great success for Paul Gravett. WTF only in the amazing success sense. Scott They killed... Wolverine? "Death of Wolverine" #1 - 4: Really Marvel? You're trying to convince us that you're actually killing your single biggest franchise character other than Iron Man and that you WON'T bring him back? Hattie Pyongyang adaptation being cancelled. I know Brenna already mentioned this but seriously: I know they had messed with the story and I know I would probably have ended up on here whinging about it but I am properly gutted about this, I love Delisle's work was really looking forward to the film. Damon Mike Watt endorsing the Minutemen tribute comic that I have a strip in: I was one of approximatley 50 artists to contribute a strip to 'Double Nickels Forever.' All hail the super talented and prolific Warren Craghead for putting together this tribute to the Minutemen's greatest LP. Ernesto None. Paddy Can't think of one apart from the Pyongyang thing already mentioned, and the Eisners. Benoit A future new Tintin album anounced early 2014 by Nick Rodwell.

Most Significant Personal Comics Moment of 2014

Brenna My best comics-related writing year yet!: Three book chapters in press and a conference paper given. A good year. Dave That I didn't read as many comics this year: I'm in a down-turn. It feels good. Peter Making my own comics: So much fun. (We're all enjoying them too! -Ed) Scott I found out that a comic I originally bought for a dollar is worth about $1300 if it comes back CGC 9.8 (and looking at it, it could). Sending off now, wish me luck!: It's "Batman Adventures" #12 btw - first appearance of Harley Quinn. Hattie Working with fellow Graphixians and others to establish SCUM: I am very excited about the Scottish Comics Unconference Meetup taking place in Glasgow at the end of February. I can't wait to take part in the debates and discussions the event and its Unconference format bring about. Damon The continuing success of DEECAP: My Dundee-based comics, art and performance evening inspired by R.Sikoryak's Carousel had it's most successful event with an autobiograpy special in September. Major thanks to all the comics performers for taking part. Ernesto All the work we did at The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship this year: We published 12 articles in a year. Not bad for an incipient open access scene within a very small academic area. Paddy Publishing Long Divisions #1, my first single issue print comic and the start of a new series: See http://paddyjohnston.co.uk/comics for more info! Benoit Participating to the TENT Comics seminar.

Most Anticipated Comic of 2015 Brenna More Lumberjanes!: I love this series so much -- cannot get enough. Can't wait to see where the wackiness goes in 2015. Dave The end of Hawkeye: We've been waiting for this forever. Forever. Peter Dispossession by Simon Grennan: This will be Simon's big comics moment. Scott Whatever Marvel is doing with its "5 months until..." running at the top of every Avengers title. They'll break out a great story because of the new movie: I love that comics movies are getting people back into reading superheroes again. Circulation numbers are on the rise across the industry. Hattie Paul dans le nord: Michel Rabagliati is my favourite comics creator ever. I cannot wait for this comic which is due in the Autumn of next year. It will undoubtedly be charming, funny and moving. Damon Here by Richard McGuire: By the time I get a copy it will be 2015. The 300-page expanded version of McGuire's 6-page strip from RAW in 1989 looks amazing. Ernesto Here by Richard McGuire: I know there's an e-version or whatever it's called out now, but I don't have an iPad and I still mostly read comics on paper. Sad, I know. Paddy Paul dans le Nord/more SOLO/more Rover Red Charlie: Hattie already got in there with Paul dans le nord, but I am so excited for that. SOLO is Hope Larson's new webcomic, which started this year. I nearly picked it as read of the year, I love it so. Rover Red Charlie is written by Garth Ennis and stars three dogs in a post-apocalyptic NYC. He nails the whole them being dogs but also being able to talk thing. A+ for that. Benoit Here by Richard McGuire: I'm wondering what a 300-page "Here" will look like.

#192 From Here to Here

admin — Tue, 06 Jan 2015 09:00:30 +0000

Intro from Paddy

This contribution by myself and Benoît to the Graphixia series on collaboration takes a slightly different angle to the others. We thought it would be interesting to examine the nature of Richard McGuire’s Here in light of its reissue and expansion into a 300-page book from a six-page short story, and to explore the nature of our own collaborations as much as those of the text itself. Our discussion of a single creator will, we hope, provide something of a counterpoint to the surrounding discussions of writer and artist collaborators, but I think our discussion has also highlighted another way of thinking about collaboration, to which I pose a question: is it possible for one to collaborate with oneself? I put it to you that Richard McGuire has done just that with his new edition of Here, updating his previous work for a new and expanded format. We’ve also collaborated ourselves in an interesting way, with Benoît tackling the 1988 comic and me tackling the 2014 book. So, without further ado…

Benoît

Richard McGuire's “Here” benefits from such a cult status in North-America and Europe that it is almost puzzling for a work of this length. Few of the short works published in RAW have found such a critical recognition as the original six-page “Here” story. Published in 1989, at the height of a ‘graphic novel revolution,’ its shortness and lack of narrative might even come across as a bold statement in the context of widespread talks on the ‘potentialities’ of the form. “Here” is clearly the work that most conspicuously demonstrated the specific affordances of comics to represent time, and the idea of charting the entire history of a place has obviously been set forth by Chris Ware. This kinship is not only clear in Building Stories (2012), but the cartoonist repeatedly refers to it in interviews and has even written an essay (“A Grateful Appreciation”) setting out his views on McGuire's comic. As Ware points out in his essay, Robert Crumb's “A Short History of America” was an antecedent to “Here,” but McGuire's comic nonetheless push the experiment farther, “towards finding a sort of new poetry of the form itself”, as Ware puts it (6). “Here” records the history of a single room through embedded panels overlapping each other within the regular structure of a conventional six-panel grid. Each panel represents the same location from the same perspective, with a superposition and juxtaposition of other panels that stand for different moments within an extremely wide span of time (none other than what the scientists call ‘deep time’). The jumps back and forth and the multiplication of panels transform the comics page into a crowded field where narrative meaning retreats into the ‘micro-dialogues’ that the reader is invited to build between the discrete elements that constitute this network of images. The most flagrant principle of comics that “Here” is overriding is also the most entrenched, that of sequentiality. Barely three years after Will Eisner praised comics as sequential art – a phrase that would quickly become virtually synonymous with the form – McGuire published a comic that simply did away with the sequence as the central aspect of comics storytelling. Of course, “Here” does not simply liquidate the sequence: the grid invites to a sequential reading with a non-chronological ordering of the ‘events,’ but ultimately not much is gained from a strict panel-to-panel kind of sequence. What “Here” favors, through its multiplication of embedded panels, is a permanent back-and-forth. Today, the critical view of comics as a network is much more widespread, not the least through the English translation of Thierry Groensteen's The System of Comics. In a 1992 article, the same Groensteen published the results of an amusing experiment of his, consisting in cutting out every panel of “Here” in order to arrange them in a chronological sequence. This little cut-and-paste exercise quickly led him to conclude that ordering the panels chronologically didn't further the understanding of a particular narrative. McGuire radically does away with the conventions of traditional narrative in order to emphasize the insignificance, smallness, and ephemerality of human lives when seen from such a large temporal perspective. But it also entices the readers to draw unexpected relationships allowed by the simultaneous co-existence of these various panels, reading moments of contrasts and connexions: an old man disguised as an Indian, a kid playing with a dinosaur toy ironically connect with a ‘real-life’ stegosaur and Native American. This network-like organization, the reader's investment in virtually reshuffling the discrete panels, and the resistance to an action-driven narrative are aspects of Richard McGuire's “Here” that bear striking affinities with digital reading practices. Not surprisingly, the artist told, in an interview with Thierry Smolderen, that he got his inspiration from hearing someone describe the Windows program:

The seed of the idea came from the apartment I had just moved into. I was thinking of who may have lived there before. I did some sketches of a split screen where time was moving forward on the left and backwards on the right. […] it was a comment [a friend of mine] made about the Windows program that got me thinking it could be a multi-view instead of the split screen. That was the eureka moment. The idea is a multi-dimensional view of time–not to think of time as linear, but of all time existing simultaneously. I wanted the viewer to think about the bigger picture, that what we experience is only part of the reality. Dinosaurs are still walking around in this space but in another time (23).

Perhaps the cult status of “Here” owes to the fact that it honed the network-like structure of the form in a way that enhances the affordances of the medium at an early stage of computer development. My curiosity about the 2014 version, then, is to see how McGuire managed the sweeping ‘digital revolution.’ Looking at his “Time Warp” cover for The New Yorker, it is clear that the changed media landscape must have impacted his works, but it also demonstrates how innovative, and perhaps forecasting, his 1989 comic was. Here simultaneously comes out as a hardcover and an e-book, and I'm curious about how the e-book works–if it is ‘interactive’ (all clicking, shuffling, and that kind of stuff)–or if it is ‘simply’ a digitized version. But also, what kind of experience is reading a 300-page version of “Here”? If one has to cut up the panels and re-arrange them into a sequence, as Groensteen did, in order to get a better idea of the various moments and storylines that the comic establishes, what about a full-fledged graphic novel? How does McGuire evince the overflow of information? Is Here a kind of big data, too large and complex to be processed? Or is Here an attempt to narrativize “Here”?

Paddy

That’s a lot of questions! But I think I have the answers to them, having just read through the beautiful hardback edition of Here for the second time. One thing to note, however: I wasn’t able to get hold of the ebook version. I was under the impression they would be released simultaneously, but the release date is listed as January 29^th on UK publisher Penguin’s website, and this is reflected in the UK iBookstore, despite it being available in the US iBookstore, for reasons I cannot fathom. So I won’t be able to comment fully on how the new edition engages with the digital revolution in this post, but I’m sure we’ll get a decent Twitter discussion going once I’ve read it, and also once Here has reached the shores of Belgium. Reviews and commentary such as this Wired piece on the new edition suggest that the ebook is highly interactive, and explores the book’s various depictions of and engagement with time and temporality by allowing for grouping of years or various panels into logical chronological sequences – a digitized version of Groensteen’s 1992 experiment which, to my mind, succinctly illustrates the impact of digital technology on reading as a whole, as well as the potential for comics to experiment with the medium whilst still remaining, essentially, comics. As Benoît suggests, though, it is clear that developments in digital technology have influenced the expansion of Here into a full-length hardcover book, as there are smartphones and screens depicted in the years surrounding the date of the book’s release. However, I don’t believe, aside from the interactive ebook edition, that the content of the comic has been affected in any significant way by digital culture. Or, to put it another way, had Here been expanded into a full-length graphic novel in the 1990s or 2000s, or at any period in time with or without the changes we’ve seen in digital culture, the end result of the content would have been the same: Here (along with “Here”) is a non-linear, expansive exercise in world-building (a term I use deliberately to invoke Dylan Horrocks’ essay “The Perfect Planet”) and exploration of representations of time, through the medium of graphic narrative, and its status as such is unaffected by digital developments. That answers, in part, Benoît’s question about whether Here is an attempt to narrativize “Here,” the answer to which is no. There are some small episodes and vignettes contained within Here which develop more naturally and in a more linear, chronological fashion than would have been possible within the original six-page strip: for example, a joke is told in 1989 over a series of square panels on consecutive pages, while various prehistoric scenes erupt around the panels and fill the double page spreads. The expanded page count allows for a much greater number of micronarratives and vignettes to unfold: a father and son meet after some years in 1775 and find, as expected, that they can’t see eye to eye; an arrow flies straight and hits its target in 1402; and a family poses on the sofa for photos, and we watch them age over various panels, randomly interjected into other scenes, some of which develop and some of which don’t – the entire spectrum of Scott McCloud’s panel transitions is represented in Here, without a doubt. A concession is made to the demand for more of a narrative payoff inherent in the graphic novel format, but I must admit that on my first reading it was lost on me, which is telling when we consider the nature of the comic and its exploration of time and world-building. The book begins with the room empty in 2014, followed by a woman in 1957 wondering why she entered the room. She is swiftly lost in the unfolding scenes, but she returns in the final few pages, with the penultimate spread depicting her answering her own question with an “ah yes…now I remember.” What it is she remembers will, of course, never be made clear, and this lack of resolution, this almost-dénouement, is the essence of both “Here” and Here: whether she remembers or not, her existence is a small, framed section of a much, much wider canvas of space and time – perhaps, to borrow an idea from Scott McCloud, an infinite one. When I say the narrative payoff was lost on me, what I mean is that when I reached the final pages of the book, I had entirely forgotten that woman in 1957’s opening words, and as such did not perceive any closure to her final words – I had to return to the opening pages, and skim through the book again, to remind myself of her previous actions and appearances. Rather than taking in a particular straightforward narrative, I had instead been taken in by the sense of infinity, of the wider canvas, of the imagined world, of the perfect distillation of the machinations of space and time, and this is the book’s great success: it manages to be a microcosm of so much of our own lived experience, in a universal and elegant fashion. McGuire’s update of his own work, therefore, is simply the shorter story writ large; a single remixed into a double-disc concept album, if you will; an expansion and improvement upon an existing text; a collaboration between texts, between time, between space, between pictures, between words. Here has achieved its almost universal acclaim for its success in realizing all of these seen and unseen collaborations, and it really works well as a 300 page book. It would work well as a 600 or even a 1000 page book. In fact, it could go on forever – there would always be stories of that one space depicted to be told, always things to be updated. World-building is never finished, but McGuire certainly gets us halfway there.

Works Cited

Greenberg, Julia. “5 Reasons to Read the Time-Traveling Graphic Novel Here.” Wired, 9^th December, 2014. Accessed 3^rd January, 2015. URL http://www.wired.com/2014/12/here-graphic-novel-richard-mcguire/ Groensteen, Thierry. “Les lieux superposés de Richard McGuire.” Urgences 32 (1991): 95-109. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Horrocks, Dylan. “The Perfect Planet.” Hicksville (blog), 2004. Accessed 3^rd January, 2015. URL http://www.hicksville.co.nz/PerfectPlanet.htm McGuire, Richard. “Here.” RAW 2.1 (1989): 69-74. McGuire, Richard. Here. New York: Pantheon Books, 2014. Smolderen, Thierry. “An Interview with Richard McGuire.” Comic Art 8 (2006): 14-39. Ware, Chris. “Richard McGuire and ‘Here’: A Grateful Appreciation.” Comic Art 8 (2006): 5-7. Ware, Chris. Building Stories. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012.

#193 Manhwa-splaining: Korean Comics and Allegories of Mastery

wilkinsp — Tue, 20 Jan 2015 05:01:37 +0000

What happens when you don’t know anything about the comics produced in a particular country and then proceed to write about them? This post seeks to find the answer to that question, as I look at the Korean manhwa XS by Song Ji-Hyung. My expertise tends towards Japanese manga rather than manhwa, which is to say that I have read a few examples of manga and absolutely none of manhwa. In our continued efforts to diversify our discussion of comics, the next thread on Graphixia is about comics from places other than North America, Europe, or Japan. We are trying to read and write about things outside our comfort zone, from a position of exploration rather than knowledge. I settled on manhwa because I felt I could relate it to my manga reading experience. I was grateful for the discrete, limited manhwa section on the Dark Horse iOS app. There were four or five different titles to choose from, and I went for the one that looked to me the most enjoyable which turned out to be XS. It occurs to me that I may have chosen XS because it looked the most familiar to me. So much for exploring new territory. The first thing I realized when I read XS was that I would be hard pressed to distinguish it from manga. The page breakdown tends to fracture the page like manga; the sound effects look like manga sound effects; urban architectural panels have a manga look to them, if not quite as precisely detailed; faces and hairstyles look like those stereotypically found in manga, even when they transform visually from the characters’ cool personae into exponents of childish rage, a typical manga trope. Reading direction seems to be the only notable difference between the Korean and Japanese comics experience: manhwa reads left to right typically, not right to left. Tom Ormsby at Manga Market helps us out a little:

Although manhwa and manga share many similarities, it is often easy to distinguish between them. Some of the main differences are as follows: -Manhwa books mostly read from left to right. -The manhwa art style tends to put more emphasis on the eyes and face of characters. -Character’s figures tend to have more realistic proportions. -There is often a more frequent use of gradient “screen tone”.

I’m not entirely convinced by this, but what do I know? So, here I was, trying to expand my horizons by reading Korean comics, but I could find nothing particularly Korean about XS in terms of its appearance. The book is set in Korea and makes a few Korean references, but that’s it as far as I could notice. Perhaps the Korean elements of XS are hidden to those who have not studied Korean culture and history. What would happen if someone unschooled in Canadian history and culture looked at Canadian comics? Quite likely, they would not be able to distinguish them from American comics. And yet, Bart Beaty or Jason Dittmer can identify what makes Captain Canuck quite different from Captain America. XS is a sci-fi adventure comic. It features tons of chases through the street as the main character, Huin Chang, tries to evade various pursuers on his Aprilia motorbike. You might get a headache from all the motion lines. In fact, I found the chase, fight, and crash scenes spectacular in the way they developed increasing abstraction. They become almost sublime, making it difficult to identify body and automobile parts at the height of the action. Speed, testosterone, and violence trump plot development or dialogue. We have to be patient in our reading to figure out why all these fights and crashes are occurring. Even then, it’s kind of blurry, probably intentionally so. Everything revolves around Huin Chang, a punk kid who likes his motorcycles and his skateboards. Chang is a cool kid, handy in a fight, protective of his girlfriend Mina, who, it turns out is from the USA. A spiky-haired mod-looking guy wreaks havoc in an airport in the US, on some sort of espionage mission (?) before returning to Korea. A mysterious street hood, keeps trying to kidnap Mina, requiring heroic action from Chang. Americans in a Cadillac chase Chang through the streets, having identified him as being significant to them for reasons not divulged by the place I am in the series. Eventually, we discover that the mod, the hood, Mina, and Chang himself are “hybrids,” which means that some other entity, in the form of a computer virus, has lodged itself in each of their brains, like a parasite in their host bodies: Mina doesn't know this herself until towards the end of the first volume. In fact, Mina turns out to be a figure named "Kali" based on the Hindu goddess. It's all very confusing, but fun. The series is not yet complete, so it's impossible to tell how it all works out. Up to volume 3 has been published by Dark Horse. The kind of possession that being a "hybrid" invokes is one of my favourite sci-fi tropes. It suggests the "something in me more than myself" of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and is ripe for allegorical reading. For what can posession be but a metaphor for colonization, occupation by another or a lack of self-knowledge, as our opaque selves act in ways that defy our conscious understanding. XS is both a formal and cultural allegory for the posession of Korea by Japan and, the United states. The form of manhwa that XS manifests is a "hybrid" in the way it is occupied and possessed by Japanese manga, echoing Korea's own occupation by Japan in World War II. The opaque self aspect of this allegory is that the occupation is not only welcome but self-inflicted. Again, I am reminded of how Canadian comics copy American comics even in the effort to come up with something distinctly Canadian in opposition to the standard superhero of American comics, at least in terms of form. Captain Canuck is different from American superheroes in the way that he acts not in the way he appears, like a body builder in a leotard with his briefs on the outside. If comics is a language with different dialects, Canadian comics speak "American" and Korean manhwa, or this one in particular, speaks "Japanese." One would have to know more about Korea and its relations to Japan than me to be able to assert whether any kind of cultural disruption is taking place, where Korea is somehow the parasite feeding off the Japanese host. I do know that Chang chastizes the street hood for driving a "Jap rocket" and that he invokes the "Japanese school girl cliche." A character who appears towards the end of volume 3: Shin Jiha is said to have just arrived from "Japland." These moments suggest a hostility and anxiety toward Japan. The expression "damn Yankees" appears a couple of times. The American role in the allegory that I am constructing is more opaque. They seem to be in the position of secretly controlling the action, and they appear to be after Mina/Kali. In fact, the Americans appear in the content of the comic somewhat like Japan does in the form. Omnipresent, secretive. Chang meanwhile is Korea embodied: heroic, adventurous, but kept in the dark, unable to figure out what his position is in relation to a plot that is too complex for him to comprehend. All he can do is fight, defend Mina (who actually appears to be far more powerful than he is), and be cool. The great thing about allegorical readings of texts that may or may not be allegorical, and when one doesn't know the culture that the allegory might refer to, is that they are fantasies of comprehension, control, and power. In the space of three volumes, I move from total ignorance of manhwa to explain how it works in relation to Japan and the United States. Suddenly, I am master of the universe. Works Cited Song Ji-Hyung. XS. Volume 1: Hybrid. Trans. Jay So. Milwaukie OR: Dark Horse, 2007. (Accessed through the Dark Horse iOS app). ----. XS. Volume 2: Angel. Trans. Jay So. Milwaukie OR: Dark Horse, 2007. (Accessed through the Dark Horse iOS app). ----.XS. Volume 3: Guardian. Trans. Jay So. Milwaukie OR: Dark Horse, 2007. (Accessed through the Dark Horse iOS app).

#176 The Roots of Canadian Identity in Lemire's Essex County

admin — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 05:03:08 +0000

#177 What Is Not Drawn: Silence in Jeff Lemire's Essex County

admin — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 19:48:21 +0000

#178 The One Where Hattie Muses on Whether She is Canadian Enough to Enjoy 'Essex County'.

admin — Tue, 26 Aug 2014 18:59:21 +0000

I’ve been meaning to read Essex County for years and somehow never got round to transferring it into my basket on any shopping trip. So I was rather glad that the Canadian Contingent of Graphixia assigned us reading for this cycle of posts. I duly ordered my copy and prepared to be engrossed. It was around about this time I found out that my sort of Canadian grandmother had passed away. As a result I’ve spent a significant amount of the past month musing on my relationship with her and my own Canadian heritage, my Father was born and spent much of his childhood in the Saint Laurent suburb of Montreal. This musing has gone hand in hand with my thoughts about Essex County and how I, as a Canadian Studies student and sort of Canadian, feel about this book that I really should, by all accounts, love. I never really considered myself in any way Canadian until I was 18 and my mum, sister and I went to Quebec, Montreal and Toronto on holiday. I had vague memories of family holidays in Toronto as a child and I did know that my Dad had grown up there but other than that I was largely unaware. Yet in that summer as we walked around the McGill campus where my Grandfather studied, and ate smoked meat sandwiches in Ben’s, where my father used to go for a treat as a small child, I felt a deep connection to the place. It felt like the city was filling in the gaps in my personal history that my strained relationship with my father and his side of the family had left. Over the last decade I have lived in Montreal twice and visited on numerous other occasions. I have started and finished a Masters about Québécois comic books and I am in the final year of a PhD about the same. If Brenna is a Professional Canadian then I think I shall refer to myself as an Apprentice Pseudo-Canadian from hereon in (Professional Pseudo Canadian in Training is a bit too much of a mouthful). All this rather self indulgent rambling is to say that when I saw that Brenna and Peter had discussed whether or not the European Graphixians* would ‘get’ Essex County I psssshawed very loudly indeed. I, Apprentice Pseudo-Canadian would definitely ‘get’ this book. Cut me and I bleed Maple Syrup. I could be none more Canadian without being born in Canada**. Reader, I hate to say it, but Brenna was possibly right***. The thing is though… I didn’t hate it, I just didn’t love it. Thinking back on it, I feel like I enjoyed it a lot more than I felt I was as I read it. Leafing through the book as I write this I keep on finding myself drawn into reread pages. I also really did like the mini comics included at the back of my edition, I enjoyed these glimpses of other Essex County stories far more than I enjoyed those that took up the majority of the book. Objectively I can appreciate the book. I liked the way in which Lemire incorporated Lester’s drawings and comics into the book. I loved the image of Lou on page 242 spread across the map of the city. I enjoyed the broad stories that were being told about these people, this place and their relationships. However I never really connected with it. I didn’t care what happened to them all, I wasn’t worried about Lester’s future, I wasn’t concerned about Lou and Vince’s relationship. I think part of my issue with the book was that I couldn’t connect to the two major themes presented within it as being almost synonymous with being Canadian, the landscape and the hockey. In previous weeks Scott and Peter have addressed these themes and how they are played out through the book. The wide fields with their open skies that go on for miles and miles seemed alien to me. I wasn’t touched by this depiction of landscapes familiar to me and so whilst I appreciated Lemire’s drawings aesthetically I wasn’t drawn to them. Meanwhile, whilst I am a fan of watching the odd Hockey game, I found myself skimming past the detailed depictions of matches. [caption id="attachment_3834" align="aligncenter" width="214"] Big Canadian Spaces[/caption] [caption id="attachment_3883" align="aligncenter" width="223"] More Hockey?[/caption] In Peter’s post he remarks on Lemire’s drawing by saying that “His lines look like they were drawn by a really talented person drawing with his wrong hand”. After days of trying to sum up how I felt about Lemire’s artwork Peter’s descripton made me do a little whop of recognition. It reminded me of how I felt on a recent trip to see Neil Gaiman perform ‘The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains’ live to projections of Eddie Campbell’s art. Some images were beautiful, detailed paintings of characters that deftly conveyed the nuance of their feelings at that moment in time. [caption id="attachment_3862" align="aligncenter" width="220"] I really liked this page...[/caption] Others looked like scribbled sketches that Campbell had hastily coloured and photoshopped. Similarly Lemire’s characters, particularly when he draws them sat in quiet contemplation, have such depth of expression in their faces that I could study them over and over again, yet frustratingly, there will then follow pages of figures and drawings that are sketchy and served only to distance me further from the narrative. I certainly don’t feel ready to write off Essex County as a book I didn’t enjoy. However I do think there might have been something to the early concerns that it might be slightly too Canadian for us to get. I don’t feel that I got as much out of Essex County as I could have and one of the joys of this series of posts has been reading what my fellow Graphixians have to say about the book and finding things to appreciate that I had perhaps missed. * Those Graphixians who currently reside in Europe. ** Even then, to be honest, you might struggle to own more kitschy, vintage Canada themed crap than me. *** Honesty forces me to include this, though it may make Brenna giddy with power.

#194 Erasure: The Soviet-era Komik

admin — Tue, 03 Feb 2015 19:04:23 +0000

Full confession: I haven't done a lot of reading for this post; I'm going purely on instinct and a desire to start the conversation not "weigh in" on it like some well-informed zealot. The bottom line is that I couldn't find many comics that covered what I wanted to address: Soviet-era komiksky. The materials are scant, supposedly as a result of a cultural impetus away from the trapping of Westernized ideology--I guess the Kremlin didn't really get that Superman was basically a communist from outer-space. Even if I managed to find something, getting my hands on it was next to impossible. The history of the Soviet-era komik is an invisible or erased one, which of course seems now like an entirely suitable topic. The politics of erasure in comics is often a popular subject. Erasure is in fact what makes some comics so valuable--the disposability and pulp of comics often causes examples to be erased from existence. When one example is found, its value is determined by the number of other examples that don't exist. But what if we were to direct our gaze to where comics are not? Could we even conceive of what we are not looking for? It's never struck me more that comics are Western in every politically, economically, and socially loaded way. They tend to idealize the Western mindset that suggests freedom from purgatory is the only option for one's existence, despite never really addressing how the beached fish even knows the water is purgatory. At the same time, comics utilize a mode of production that, at least until recently, relies on the disposability of its tactile representation, and the repetition of its narratives; a Westernized advertising strategy that echoes the Fordian efficiency of the assembly-line if there ever was one: "you can have any superhero you want, as long as its a Capitalist." In short, erasure is a common thread the spins out of the button and to some extent releases comics from accountability. As long as we don't look at comics long enough, or don't have access to comics that reflect a different political, social, or economic agenda, everything will be fine. Sometimes, there's a pre-determined perspective that governs the study of comics. Because the "discipline" is nascent, sort of, we're allowed to get away with all kinds of pretty myopic textual choices. For instance, one of the reasons we're doing this sequence on "foreign" comics is to broaden our view, but I for one was guilty of not really accounting for the mere availability of comics outside the cultural mainframe (what? there's nothing on comixology? What do I do now!?). Most often, comics scholarship has a real need to establish its domain of interrogation, in structuralist terms, by laying into the most voluminous material which, it so happens, is usually North American and Japanese in origin. At best it's a delightful mix of Anglo-American, White European, and Asian texts providing plenty of fodder for the adventurous and canonical among us. At worst it discounts other perspectives--political, economic, cultural--in favour of aggrandizing a set of values that seem to be reinforced by the genre's own heroic values. In short, we are what we read. All of which brings me to the communists. While abhorring everything to do with the Bourgeois West, the Soviets put the kibosh on any comic book best sellers in the republic. But one can't help but wonder what a comic book from the Soviets would look like. The cold war truth is that we may never know what that might have looked like. Even now, the archives prioritize narratives such as Nikolai Maslov's "Siberia" that shows a desolate and bleak worldview of the Russian state in which the main character wanders through a Dantean Inferno of a Soviet system eventually going insane. Everything about Maslov's book, the bleak storyline, the sketchy pencil drawing, the deeply introspective bent, the historiographic gaze backward, belongs to the structuralist triggers of the Western comics cannon for "arty" autobiography--Spiegleman, Satrapi, Crumb, Bechdel, Barry (ugh); Die Hard with a pencil. If I have a point, it's this: where's our gaze directed? And why? I'm not suggesting that the persecuted individual without freedoms should not be saved by the freedom-loving potential of a comicbook. Absolutely, I'm pro comics that help those in shitty situations overcome those shitty situations, however marginal that "help" might be. At the same time, if comics are as universal as comics scholars often suggest that they are, then what are the conditions of that universality. Taking a cue from the recent bent toward "Broken World Thinking," comics are not produced in an economic, political, or cultural vacuum, and we do a pretty good job of talking about how comics under-represent women, minorities, etc. But what about the comics we can't see? And, what about those cultural, economic, and political situations that prohibit the very existence of comics? What about that situation? How do we even understand that situation? Can we, even? Should we, even? (This is all very Duchamp all of a sudden... he liked it better broken.) In the end, what exercises like this one tell me is that there's a whole lotta stuff out there that's been erased; not "just" silenced. Restoring erasure is way harder than restoring silences, and that's something comics might need to grapple with -- that erasure is built into the political, economic, and cultural apparatus of comics themselves.

#195 The Post That Almost Wasn't: The Road to Qahera

admin — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 21:36:36 +0000

I am well outside my comfort zone this month, Graphixia friends, with the plan to write about non-North American / non-Western European comics. I think of myself as a fairly diverse reader, but I realized all my potential topics (comics and indigenous experiences in New Zealand, the impact of WW2 on the Australian comics industry, representations of the Middle East in comics) kept circling back to be comparative studies of a world I was already familiar with, or depended on readings of comics published in North America or Europe or written by non-locals within the context and expectation of "Western" (I know, yucky term) comics. One wants to challenge oneself. One doesn't want to be the dope writing about Jerusalem for the international diversity month at Graphixia, you know? (Which might have been my original plan.) The other problem is one of access. I found a dozen comics I really wanted to read and potentially write about but couldn't secure a copy of; comics like Rebirth: A Graphic Novel or Metro: A Story of Cairo that were not going to get to me in time to write this piece if accessible in Canada at all. In so many ways, this ain't yet a global village. I started to dabble in webcomics, especially as part of my search for Rebirth, and I came upon the world of South African webcomics; I read all of Tomica and Cottonstar, which was a really interesting process not least because I am used to a more self-contained webcomic series. Both Tomica and Cottonstar are more like page-a-day calendars for comics, and the lengthy arcs were an interesting counterpoint to what I typically think of as webcomics. Webcomics, however, they were the ticket in, because they led me to Qahera. Hello, lover. This is a webcomic created by an Egyptian woman about a hijab-wearing female superhero who fights misogyny and white-lady feminism and is awesome and I will talk about it in more detail in a second, BUT. I wanted to recount this story of my search for something to write about this month because I think we need to talk more about how hard it is to find these stories even when we go looking for them -- how even the most aware and engaged comics consumer can look at their shelves and find a lot of white people, a lot of dudes, a lot of Westerners (ew, icky word again). I'm glad we did this topic, even if I flailed a lot, because it showed me that I pretty much exclusively read North American / European comics. And now I can work on doing something different. Starting with the bad-ass Qahera. You guys, I am in love. Qahera is a feminist superhero who sometimes fights the little battles sometimes fights the big battles and sometimes fights the battles that are invisible to other activists and so-called allies. Through the comic, creator Deena tackles a lot of difficult issues, and her representations are perhaps not always perfect; one of the most interesting aspects of the blog, however, is Deena's willingness to engage with her readership. For example, one reader disagreed with Deena's perspective on white-lady feminism and its myopic desire to see women in hijab as oppressed and in need of rescue, and that blog response is now linked as part of the FAQ about the webcomic as a whole. Likewise, because the Qahera comic is hosted on Tumblr, the "ask" box has become a site of active debate and discussion about these overarching issues. For example, in response to the question of why Qahera isn't a super violent comic, even when the threats faced are dire:

Lastly, the reason I didn’t make Qahera a particularly violent and gory comic (trust me, i really really wanted to. I have awesome blood spatter brushes I wanna work with) is that Qahera is a Muslim woman. She’s not just a woman. If Qahera was known for being a blood-thirsty superhero, it would be probably be cool for about five seconds, but I can guarantee the backlash from it would be really ugly (I already received criticism before because she was ‘holding a sword’ even though she didn’t use it.) Muslim women also have to face the stereotypes all Muslims face: violent, bloodthirsty, angry, “jihadi.” That’s not what I want Qahera to be, and it’s not what I want her to be known for.

It's thoughtful, it's engaged, it's open to criticism, and it's the start of a dialogue. It's my platonic ideal of a webcomic, and I had no idea it existed because I am an ignorant dork. So my take-away from this month at Graphixia is this: even if you think you read a lot of different stuff, make an effort to do better. Maybe not the highest critical heights I've ever reached, but probably a more important lesson in the long run.

#196 Where’s Côte d’Ivoire Again? Abouet and Oubrerie’s Aya: Life in Yop City

admin — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 07:54:03 +0000

As this month’s Graphixia topic has revealed, looking for comics outside the Western paradigm isn’t something that even scholars of the medium do very often, or at least not intentionally. When presented with the concept, we’re forced to meet it as a challenge since our North Amerocentric market just doesn’t seem to have room for them on our shelves – the main (and pretty much the only) distributor of comics in the United States and Canada is Diamond Distribution. This is the company that offers significant discounts and exclusives to retailers, and they’re essentially a monopoly for comic shops. If you’re a comics retailer, you in effect have to order wholesale directly through Diamond, or if you’re a reader, you similarly have to order through a secondary retail channel (like I do), being someone who resells from their Diamond order. This means that if you’ve made it into the monthly Diamond Previews, you’ve essentially made it and your books have a market. If not, then you have no chance of commercial success in North America. Their catalogue – even their backstock – is entirely English language and nearly entirely Western, save for the increasing amount of Manga that has been predominantly marketed by Viz and others to find its way to North American shelves. And Manga has been so fully integrated that it nearly falls into what we think of as being Western regardless (though I’m sure that comment might not truck well with some). The web is of course changing this dynamic quite a bit in terms of access to international digital comics, but it has not yet impacted international print comics in the slightest. All this to say that when trying to find something from this outside my comfort zone, I actually began feeling guilty that I had reached so little into countries that do not “traditionally” produce comics, or at least countries that do not produce them by means and in forms with which we are familiar. Thankfully I do have a little experience with some of the non-Western comics that have come to me, slightly embarrassingly, through winning Western awards. One of the most internationally celebrated in recent memory is Aya: Life in Yop City, written by Marguerite Abouet and richly illustrated by her husband Clement Oubrerie, an anthology collecting the first several issues in a series coming out of Côte d’Ivoire in Western Africa and which has reached North America by means of being shortlisted for an Eisner and winning the Best First Album award at Angouleme in Paris. Ostensibly a pseudo-biographical story about the life of a young woman in the working class village of Yopougon, the graphic novel is at first a challenging read for a Western audience despite dealing with universal coming of age themes. Though it has been translated and published in North America by Drawn and Quarterly (a company which deserves loud and repeated thanks for the risks it takes in allowing originally non-English texts to enter our market), many of the idioms don’t quite work (ie “your mouth is as big as a cow’s behind”), nor does the naming of “uncles” and “sisters” for strangers being approached by those peddling wares or attempting to strike a bargain. The way the characters interact seems stilted and unreal, not because of a poor translation but because it employs slang all too realistically and, rightly, in a way that unapologetic for a wider audience. Language use notwithstanding (there’s a gloss in the back of the North American edition for difficult and unfamiliar African slang), the content is difficult to navigate as well as it is set in an intensely unfamiliar environment and deals with predominantly unfamiliar moments which are, likely, meant to be casually and tacitly understood by a local reader. A notable example comes when Aya’s close friend Adjoua, caught in a love triangle in her attempts to wrangle the most eligible bachelor in the village, thinks she has palau, being a slang term for malaria when, in fact, it turns out she is actually just pregnant. This is passed off as something so casual as to barely be noticed, whereas the stigma that a Western reader brings to potentially contracting malaria makes the scene highly unsettling – here, it’s the pregnancy that’s meant to be emphasized, not the illness, and while we know that this is the case, it’s difficult to shake the clearly incorrect response one has to the scene. A similar interruption in our preset Western responses comes when Aya is being harassed on the street by an aggressive male attempting to pick her up, and she runs to protection by a more progressive couple who will stand up for her rights as a woman. The defense is, however, disconcerting. The protector asks of the pursuer, “you were about to hit a girl and you don’t even know who her father is. Are you looking for trouble?” (53). One can read this as a commentary on a woman’s place in the Ivory Coast being damned on all sides, however this is again an entirely Western perspective grafted onto the text that the surrounding context of the scene does not support – this is the progressive attitude in the story, and it certainly comes across that it’s meant to be perceived as such. The milieu is so inherently different, clearly written for a very different audience with different cultural baggage, that it’s problematic to interpret even the most basic of signifiers. The graphic novel is rife with moments of rupture like this, where a casual and highly social text challenges our engagement and reminds us that while we are reading this culture, we are not of it. The reason that Aya (and other truly authentic texts like it) is difficult to approach is because, very simply, it’s not in any way making any attempt to be approachable. Despite the obvious pandering to a Western market in later editions through appendices that include everything from Cote d’Ivoire recopies infographics on how to wrap a baby, the original issues are a rare portrayal of raw, suburban life in a country of which very few readers know anything at all about. Very often we see in “exotic” texts a desire to exemplify a culture or a setting, to explain to readers that yes, this is what the Other looks like and yes, you need not be afraid. The graphic novels that have famously reached the West about foreign environments, for example the very frequently taught Persepolis, always appear to have this self-conscious mission about them, consistently attempting to categorize and tell a reader how to behave when reading in between the panels. Aya doesn’t cast these kinds of aspersions, and in this, it’s truly what we could identify as different: non-Western, with often radically unfamiliar cultural mores tucked beneath the surface reading, unspoken because they’re intended for an audience that carries all these with them already. In French, German, Russian, even South American texts there’s always something of the Western, and I’ve found a certain affinity and an entrypoint for shared cultural and sociological understanding that has been necessary to underpin engagement. The absence of this in Aya is, ironically, what makes texts from places like the Ivory Coast so appealing in that one essentially has to relearn the reading process and become comfortable with being confounded by a lack of context and social awareness. Of course it does not intentionally attempt to ostracize – quite the contrary, in that it was originally doing its best to accommodate the local audience for whom the first issues were intended. But the result remains the same: dipping into the comics of another culture, comics originally not intended for export, is at once intriguing, informative and ultimately unsettling in the best possible way. Work Cited Abouet, Marguerite. Aya: Life in Yop City. Illustrated by Clement Oubrerie. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2012. Print.

#197 Adventures in Brazil, André Diniz's 'Picture a Favela'

admin — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 22:00:53 +0000

Like Brenna in her post for this series I think it is important to be open about our experiences of trying to find comics to discuss from outside Europe, North America and Japan. Because of the focus of my research and a close friend who lives there, I initially decided that I would look at comics from New Caledonia… And then I realized that looking at the French Diaspora wasn’t really pushing me out of my reading comfort zone. I like to think that I read quite widely and diversely, and for the last couple of years have made a conscious choice to be better at doing so. However in preparing for this post I realized that even when I do make efforts to read books (both comics and not) from a diverse range of creators I don’t tend to look outside my North American and European comfort zone and even more rarely do I write about them. So this is me throwing down the gauntlet to myself and saying that I have to do better. Not to let myself entirely off the hook I also struggled to find and get hold of comics from countries outside Europe and North America. Partly this was an issue of language and translation but even with the internet at my fingertips I struggled to find somewhere to buy quite a number of comics I found. I’ve chosen to head to Brazil this time round, partly because I found this book and fell in love with the artwork. André Diniz’s Picture a Favela is his effort to create a comic book biography of his friend Maurício Hora a well-known Brazilian photographer. While Diniz’s name was new to me it turns out that he is exceedingly successful in his own country and has been awarded the highest accolade available in Brazilian comics on no fewer than three occasions. This book, his most recent, was translated into French and English and published in the UK by Self Made Hero in 2012. The book tells the story of Hora’s childhood in the original favela, Providencia Hill, located behind the train station in Rio de Janeiro. Hora grew up in the favela as the son of a gangster, a man who bears more than a passing resemblance to Don Corleone and fulfills a similar role within his local community, at least in terms of caring for his neighbours and resolving difficult situations. In this history roles are reversed and it is the police that the residents of Providencia Hill need to be scared of not the local gangsters. The story is told through the voice of Hora, and we see his journey from a young child confused about his gangster father to a photography obsessed adolescent. The artwork is almost exclusively in black and white (all but the final panel) and is reminiscent of linocuts. The irregular edges and stark colour palette make these images as spiky and uncomfortable to read as the society they depict. The images initially appear simple and this reinforces the idea that these are memories told from the perspective of a child. However as the story progresses and Hora reveals his fractured relationship with his father and the progression of his mother’s schizophrenia, the sharp jagged lines of his art seem the ideal way in which to reflect these difficult aspects of his life. Hora’s narration confides to the reader, and indeed repeatedly shows, that although he was born there and grew up in the area, he is still unable to take photos in every part of the favela. Thus this book serves a dual purpose, it not only tells Hora’s fascinating story but also allows the reader to see a version of areas that even Hora cannot photograph easily. By drawing in a style that is so physically different from Hora’s photographs, Diniz doesn’t try to recreate the vision of the favela that Horsa presents through his photography but instead offers a version of the area that attempts to in some ways communicate Hora’s childhood experiences of the space. Jagged, menacing and yet simple and two-dimensional, Diniz’s evocation of Hora’s life and art is compelling. Picking a book published by a significant UK publisher might not have been the most adventurous foray into comics from outside Europe, America and Japan but it is certainly a choice I am glad I made. I'm going to start by looking for more books by Diniz that I can read and then see what else I can find.

#198 Comics Power!

admin — Wed, 04 Mar 2015 17:20:22 +0000

You wait years for an event with an Indian cartoonist in Dundee and then two come along within a fortnight. At the end of June last year Scottish PEN and Literary Dundee hosted an event sponsored by the then ubiquitous Commonwealth Games. In an event entitled Reinterpreting Women’s Stories using the Surreal and the Mythological Karrie Fransman from the UK and Amruta Patil from India discussed the “mythological and fantastic aspects of their work.” This was the first time I had encountered Patil’s comics, and I was captivated by her work. Her first book Kari (2008) is the story of “a young, deeply introverted, asocial and queer woman, a counterpoint to the hyperfeminine prototypes you keep coming across.” The book concerns lost love, survival and friendship, and is beautifully drawn in black ink with pencil shading but with frequent bursts of colour. Her latest book Adi Parva - Churning of the Ocean (2012) is the first in her two volume adaptation of the Mahabharat, one of the major epics of ancient India. If I'd had enough money I would have bought both books on the spot but I decided to go for Kari (start at the beginning of a career!). Patil took the time to chat to the people buying her books and graciously drew dedications in them all. It was a joy to watch her sketch on my copy. [caption id="attachment_4165" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The opening page of Kari (2008) © Amruta Patil[/caption] The Mahabharat has been adapted countless times over the centuries in various media including a 42 volume comics series from Amit Chitra Katha (ACK). Founded in 1967 by Anant Pai, ACK was for a long time pretty much the entire Indian comics industry and they have released over 440 issues. Having published English language comics featuring American heroes such as The Phantom, Pai realised that there was a desire for comics featuring Indian characters and stories. They moved from publishing European stories such as Cinderella in Hindi to Indian stories such as Krishna in English (to appeal to a middle class readership). During the 1970s the original art from the stories in ACK was relettered to make issues available in Hindi and various other regional languages including Bengali, Malayalam, Kannada, and Assamese. By the end of the decade ACK had become the best-selling comic book series in India (McLain 2009). [caption id="attachment_4168" align="alignright" width="200"] Sharad Sharma by Sharad Sharma[/caption] While I enjoy fictional stories based in myth as much as the next reader, what I truly love are stories told by ordinary people about their own lives created in their own words and pictures. A few weeks before the Patil and Fransman talk I received an email from the education officer at Dundee Contemporary Arts (my office is in their building and I have occasionally hosted comics making workshops for them). It explained that a comics artist from India was hosting a workshop for the local authority and wondered if I would like to take part. I was intrigued and said I would be delighted to attend. The workshop was hosted by Sharad Sharma of the World Comics Network. Sharma is a cartoonist based in New Delhi, India. He was associated with several newspapers and magazines as a journalist and editorial cartoonist before he switched to electronic media and introduced political animation to Indian TV news channels. A committed comics activist, Sharma founded the World Comics Network (WCN) as a way of empowering people to tell their own stories and to raise issues important to them. The WCN slogan Comics Power! is no accident and they teach workshops to hand that power to people all over the world. He set up World Comics to promote issues based “Grassroots Comics” - short stories produced on easily reproducible photocopier paper made by the people directly affected by the issues. According to their website the network is active in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Brazil, Thailand, Palestine, Estonia, Finland, UK, Tanzania, Mozambique, Benin and Mongolia.

ABCD of Grassroots Comics is #Anybodycandraw pic.twitter.com/KMqllmNtC5 — World Comics Network (@WorldComicsNet) July 14, 2014

Sharma explained his methodology for encouraging people to draw their own stories, what he called the ABCD of comics. If anyone has been in earshot of me over the last few months (including at the ‘zines’ discussion at the Scottish Comics Unconference Meet-up last weekend) you will have heard me excitedly explaining this idea. It is this simple - Any Body Can Draw. Really. That’s it. This effortless philosophy lies at the heart of everything WCN do, and it helps to empower people to tell their stories. As the WCN website says most of the time these Grassroots Comics are “linked to some organisation activity or the social campaign. The comics are photocopied and distributed to a limited area, which encourage local debate in the society. They are inexpensive and the method is not complicated, you just require a pen, paper and access to a copying machine to produce one.” WCN also promotes the idea of stripping down a story to four panels to tell it succinctly and clearly as possible. These four panel strips can then be used like posters around the towns and villages. [caption id="attachment_4167" align="aligncenter" width="600"] World Comics Network FAQ © Sharad Sharma[/caption] There are many parallels with the fanzine boom of the 1970s which coincided with punk and a “do-it-yourself” philosophy. Fanzines existed at least as early as the 1930s but the access to cheap reproduction helped cause an explosion of self expression in the 1970s. Like these zines the creators of Grassroots Comics own the content, unlike them the distribution isn’t limited to being handed out at gigs or by mail order. The comics are pasted up in all possible locations such as the “village’s meeting place, bus stops, shops, offices, schools, on notice-boards and electricity poles or even on trees.” It is almost impossible to not see these short comics and the message they promote. It seems slightly odd to have discussed both Sharma and Patil's work in this post during Graphixia's series on comics from countries other than Europe, North America and Japan (snappy title) as they have very little in common apart from the country they were born in, and that is such an arbitrary notion to base a post on. But I did discover their work within two weeks of each other, and both of their comics are a testament to the different powers of comics. The myth based richly textured stories of Patil that work so well in comics, and the short straight forward four-panel strips of real life that Sharma and the World Comics Network help bring to public attention. Like graphic novels and newspaper strips, they are very different but still contain the power of comics. Comics Power to the people! Works cited Gravett, Paul (2012) Amruta Patil: India's First Female Graphic Novelist McLain, Karline (2009) India's Immortal Comic Books: Gods, Kings, and Other Heroes Indiana University Press Patil, Amruta (2008) Kari HarperCollins Publishers India Patil, Amruta (2012) Adi Parva - Churning of the Ocean HarperCollins Publishers India World Comics Network

#199 Pat Grant’s Toormina Video, on video

admin — Tue, 10 Mar 2015 08:00:36 +0000

Like the majority of the Graphixians have done this series, I feel I ought to open with a disclaimer about my comfort zone being firmly within Anglo-American comics, and to offer my assurance that I’m working hard to change this. In fact, through the other posts in this series and through last week’s Scottish Comics Unconference, I have been discovering cartoonists from Brazil and India, among other countries, who have absolutely floored me, and I continue to do so every day. I had intended to write about Sharad Sharma and his wonderfully inclusive ABCD (Any Body Can Draw) mantra, as it was a big hit with me and others at the Unconference, but Damon got there first. However, in researching comics and performance to prepare for my first DeeCAP appearance last weekend, I chanced upon a comics performance by one of Australia’s most prominent alternative cartoonists on YouTube, and was really struck by it. And as nobody has really talked about Australian comics in this series – apart from Brenna, in passing – I thought this comic would be the perfect subject for some reflections on comics and performance, with a global spin for the series. The comic in question is Toormina Video, an autobiographical story by Australian cartoonist Pat Grant. I can’t be certain, but I think it’s the first Australian comic I read, after somebody posted a link to it on Twitter last year. It’s bleak and hopeful in equal measure, poignant but still funny, with a couple of panels that stopped me dead with their encapsulation of the persistence of death and decay. Grant’s art style, with small, oval eyes and heavy brushstrokes, bears more than a passing resemblance to James Kochalka’s American Elf, but is unique in its application of colours and its limited palette, which works hard in Toormina Video to deliver a shady, hazy portrait of Grant’s Australian childhood, seen as if through a series of photographs in sepia. Grant’s father is portrayed as an alcoholic who leaves his young son in the car while he drinks, and later suffers serious psychological problems as an old man, until he eventually dies. And yet, as he is in Grant’s comic, drawn in Grant’s soft, upbeat and thick-stroked style, I can’t help but warm to him. [caption id="attachment_4193" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Toormina Video[/caption] Reading Toormina Video online is an evocative experience, and one that has certainly stayed with me as an exemplary narrative about growing up in rural Australia, as well as my most prominent experience of reading Australian autobiographical comics. I’ve since read many others, mostly through recommendations in The Australian Comics Journal and the weekly free offering from the excellent Caravan of Comics, which introduces a new Australian cartoonist each week. I highly recommend getting stuck into both of those. From my limited experience there, it seems the culture of Australian comics is vibrant and engaging, and often deals with the concerns of the disparate landscape of such a large continent, as I somewhat expected. Toormina Video, however, still remains the most prominent example, to me, of Australianness, as performed in the art form of autobiographical comics. For me, Grant’s father came to embody Australia itself, a father whose parenting provided a barren and harsh landscape, but one shot through with warmth and comfort – the only video store for miles around. So it’s a great comic when read. When performed, however, I found the emotiveness of the narrative doubled – and I didn’t even see it live, I just watched it on YouTube. The video is taken from a live perfomance Grant gave for Radio With Pictures, an Australian collective momvement for comics performance similar to Scotland’s DeeCAP. What is notable about the video is that the comic has been adapted for the performance, with all the textual narrative removed, leaving only the images. All the text is narrated by Grant himself, allowing him to control the flow of the comic much more closely than would be possible with a traditional reading experience, but also – and most significantly – allowing him to bring an extra dimension to the narrative of his comic, through his reading voice and his Australian accent. [caption id="attachment_4198" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Toormina Video[/caption] Just as Damon’s Scottish accent provides another layer of narrative when incorporated into his DeeCAP performances, so does Pat Grant’s Australian accent provide an explicit marker of Australianness, making his performance of Toormina Video doubly Australian and thus doubly unique, but also doubly representative of its creation outside of the Anglo-American paradigm that dominates the global art form of comics. As such, and as a newly incensed advocate of performing comics, I’d like to see more comics being performed from all over the world, as there is a clear opportunity to bring an extra narrative dimension that opens comics to non Anglo-American (and Franco-Belgian and Japanese) creators and audiences. Especially with YouTube as a growing global platform, we may eventually find that our exposure to comics from outside our Western paradigms eventually happens as much through performances as through traditional reading, if the effectiveness of Pat Grant’s performance of Toormina Video is anything to go by.

#201 What Are Israeli Comics? A Conversation with Assaf Gamzou, Curator at the Israeli Cartoon Museum

admin — Tue, 14 Apr 2015 18:24:29 +0000

As the previous posts have clearly demonstrated, this series on comics outside of North-America, Europe, and Japan clearly helps explore new horizons, discover other ways of making comics, and find new, different voices that showcase the diversity of comics. This series also reveals some of comics studies’ biases and its focus on major traditions. The important question of access has rightfully come up several times: many of the previous posts are as much about the comic in question as about the writer's encounter with that particular comic. Dave's post clearly pushes towards the deepest stakes of the access issue by reflecting on erasure, asking “what about the comics we can’t see?” For my post, I immediately thought of writing on Israeli comics because of their visibility at the time of Peter's first post. Indeed, last January, Gilad Selitkar, Asaf and Tomer Hanuka were touring Europe, with prominent conferences, signing sessions and conversations in Paris, Angoulême and Brussels, bringing significant attention to what was termed the “nouvelle bande dessinée israélienne” ('new Israeli comics'). The term refers in fact to the “nouvelle bande dessinée française,” which designated the bestselling success of authors as Trondheim, Sfar, and Blain beyond the alternative sphere. I was interested in how these Israeli comics were fit into a pre-existent French model, which made me wonder about the place of this so-called 'new Israeli comics' in Israel. I feared I would not learn much more about Israeli comics only by reading what French-speaking people say they are. This is why I asked Assaf Gamzou, who is curator at the Israeli Cartoon Museum, if he wanted to collaborate on this post in order to gain from his insights into the subject. Benoît – Maybe these artists – Rutu Modan, Gilad Selitkar, Asaf and Tomer Hanuka – could get us started. I know big American and European publishers directly publish many of them, and the Hanuka brothers have been trained respectively in New York and Lyon. To some extent, they do not really seem to stand out from the big comics tradition, but to have integrated with it. This, of course, is a regular pattern: cartoonists coming from the 'periphery' need to reach the 'center' in order to gain visibility for their works. How do you think about this hierarchical dynamic with relation to Israeli comics? Are they really the 'periphery'? And how representative is this 'Israeli canon'? Assaf – Well, I think you make an excellent point about the influences on these artists. When I look at them, I don’t just see this generation, but 80 past years of making comics in Israel. When looking at it from that angle, several other points come to mind. This is the point where I guess I should tell you and the readers a bit about the History of Israeli Comics: Israeli comics can be roughly separated into three “waves” or “generations.” The first – from 1935 to 1975, is characterized by the view of the medium as infantile, and its main mode of production is the newspaper strip for kids. Also, most (but not all) of these strips were genre plots 'borrowed,' in both style and content, from America and nationalized to tell an "Israeli" story. For example: The Knights of The Wailing Wall (1974), drawn by Dov Zigelman and written by Giora Rotman: an historical comic strip that tells the adventures of a Jewish boy during the crusades. After saving the crusade leader, the boy is knighted and given the title of 'protector of the wall', a title which he keeps until the six day war, when Jewish soldiers once again conquer the wall. Therefore, speaking in very broad terms, there was not much original work or style done at the time (this isn't absolutely accurate of course, as there were some wonderful artists and writers working at the time). The second wave starts after The Yom Kippur war (1973) and the crisis that followed that war. This generation of cartoonists rejected the notions of nation building and child-oriented work. Instead, they created work that was sometimes subversive, many times oriented towards teens or mature audiences, and stylistically unique. The 'godfather' of this generation is Dudu Geva with Me Gochach (Ridiculous) behind enemy lines (1985). In this image – a spoof on the Israeli soldier hero genre. Geva was one of the leaders among cartoonists and cultural figures in the deconstruction of prevalent Israeli myths and cultural beliefs during the 1980s. While Geva was very aware of his artistic origins and influences, and the history of the medium, he strove to create a unique "Israeli" style. This style was minimalistic, rash and full of visual "Chutzpa". Other notable artists and works include Itzik Rennert with Herzl visits Israel (1990). In this strip, Rennert uses the style of his predecessors – the adventure strip (used by them to depict soldiers and heroes), to poke fun at modern day Israel and the founder of Zionism – Theodor Herzl. Another example is Uri Zohar (1988)by Michel Kichka. Uri Zohar was a famous bohemian and film maker, who later in his life turned to religion and became a Hassidic Rabbi. Kichka, a Belgian born Israeli cartoonist, shows his amazement at Zohar's announcement, made late at night during his radio show. This generation was in a very real sense the anti-thesis of their predecessors: rallying against power structures and taboos, wishing to have their own style. The mid 90's brought along their students, who were begging to graduate from the Art academies. These students, like Gilad Seliktar, Rutu Modan, Asaf and Tomer Hanuka, wished to create their own style like their teachers, except for two major differences: they were more willing to incorporate the influences of American and French comics, and also actively pursued publication in those countries. Thematically speaking, they many times deal with personal, even autobiographical stories, that reflect a much larger political and social condition. So, from my perspective this looks like a perfect Hegelian cycle: thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis. From your point of view, it is the periphery assimilating into the mainstream. Benoît – Thanks for this crash course in the history of Israeli comics! This is precisely what is at stake when we look at comics in a global perspective and at these cultural exchanges: these cartoonists are integrated into the “target” traditions at the cost of the historical perspective, where they come from, what feeds into them. Now, when I said that Modan, Selitkar and Hanuka brothers were 'assimilating' into the North-American and Franco-Belgian mainstream, I didn't mean that they consciously tried to integrate them by all cost, and overall, I think it is rather that they produce original work that makes part of a recent, general internationalization of comics production. So, this dichotomy of 'center' and 'periphery' has broken down to some extent. However, when Francophone media portray these artists as the 'new Israeli comics' based on their own indigenous models, it does not seem to do them justice, obscuring the larger tradition – where, as you pointed out, Israeli cartoonists seem to have been intensely aware of this history all along. Now, the three waves you sketched, to some extent, follow a relatively similar course as in the US and in Europe (though in different ways, of course!). What, to me, seems to stand out from your overview, is this relationship to conflict and militarism, the Israeli soldier hero genre, which is very much tied in with the historical and political context. This is something that also characterized Selitkar, Modan, and the Hanuka brothers. For instance, The Divine (2015),by Tomer and Asaf Hanuka with Boaz Lavie, is a fictional tale, inspired by a press photograph of a child soldier in South-East Asia. It relies on a powerful Asian-inspired imagery worked into an idiosyncratic style that is otherwise influenced by American comic books. In contrast with Selitkar and Modan's stories, it's much less directly grounded in the socio-political context of today's Israel, but nonetheless broaches questions of conflict. So, how would you frame the social and political implications of these artists? And, more generally, what is the political position and role of comics and cartoons in Israel? Assaf – Well, I think you're spot-on in your analysis of the works you mentioned. As you said, while the Hanuka brothers don’t deal directly with the Israeli political reality, their ability to pick and choose stylistic elements from different graphic traditions and their choice of conflict as subject matter are very emblematic of Israeli cartooning in general. Generally speaking, I think we are witnessing a constant rise in the discursive space allotted to the medium in Israeli society. At first the medium was marginalised in its production and target audience, and subjected to the national ethos. Now works' like Modan's The Property and Michel Kichka's The second Generation are works that are read, debated, discussed and taught by the public in general, and not just art-school graduates and "comic nerds". However, it is worth noting that both of the works mentioned here deal with the memory of the Holocaust – a major discursive force by itself. Works that deal with the army (like Seliktar's Tsav 8), a more controversial issue, might have a harder time getting recognition. This means that it is still an effort to publish a graphic novel in Israel – but we're definitely getting there, as far as acceptability is concerned.

#202 Death in the Library: Bef & Yorko's Mexican Steampunk Noir

admin — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 16:36:16 +0000

“Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.” ― Attributed to Ray Bradbury “There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” ― Albert Camus, 1942 “The electric things have their life too.” ― Philip K. Dick, 1968 “The future is unknown, but in the eyes of the painter, Mexico always remains.” ― Bernard S. Myers, 1956 1874 is a science fiction/speculative fiction prose novella by Mexican author Bernardo Fernández "Bef". The book was published electronically in 2013, and the same year he worked adapting his text into comics/graphic novella form with artist Jorge F. Muñoz "Yorko". Both authors are from Mexico City, also known as "D.F.", whose metropolitan area is said to reach 21.2 million people (World Population Review). Why this matters may or may not become clearer later on. The result is a kind of Mexican steampunk noir thriller that addresses issues of genre and politics as pinpointed by information technology. It is interesting that though Bef is also a comics artist, in this case he worked with another artist and limited his participation to the adaptation of the text. The result is two distinctively different books/texts/artifacts. Here I won't dwell on the differences between the original and its adaptation. My main point in this short post, however, is suggesting that 1874 the graphic novella, though clearly inserted within the science fiction genre/tradition, represents an example of how Mexican comics are expressing the local through the global. The "local" in this case means a particularly Mexican vision of the national state of affairs; the "global" the globalized discourse of science fiction (and genre variants) and "the graphic novel". The story is set in a floating city/world inhabited by automata/robots/self-operating humanoid machines. The consequences of a war are suggested. The protagonist is Sr. Inspector, a detective whose stream of consciousness we have access to and which directs the narrative. He receives a message that there has been a murder at the Central Library: the (only) librarian has been apparently murdered. Or did he/she/it killed him/her/itself? Can automata/robots kill themselves? And if not, who would have wanted the librarian dead, and how can the mystery be solved? [caption id="attachment_4221" align="aligncenter" width="508"] Fernández, B. y Muñoz F. J. (2013) 1874. México: Resistencia. Page 5[/caption] What lies at the core of 1874 is the interconnections/wirings that plug everything together. The heart of the matter is, indeed, information: what we know and what we do not know, what are lies and what are secrets, the format in which information and memories can be preserved and shared, and what happens when the platforms/methods for communicating memory/history are destroyed, or tampered with. 1874 is also very obviously a homage to an ever-increasing pile of well-known influences: Asimov, Chandler, Hammett, Bradbury, C. Clarke, Lucas, even Frank Miller. The panel layouts are designed to convey the frustratingly slow-yet-frantic pace of the urban commute in a big, dangerous, impersonal and polluted metropolis, whilst evoking panel by panel the melancholy introspection of the hard-boiled, tough-but-romantic detective. Bef's and Yorko's visual storytelling supports itself on regular panel layouts on the page that mirror each other when two pages are viewed simultaneously. The cinematic pace is supported by changes in point of view/perspective that alternate rhythmically following the flow of the dialogue between characters (this/that/here/there/left/right/left/right). This flow is successfully punctuated by the clever use of a ping-pong of short sentences in the dialogue between characters that fluent Latin American Spanish readers will recognize as overtly formal and therefore bureaucratic and artificially forced. [caption id="attachment_4222" align="aligncenter" width="593"] Fernández, B. y Muñoz F. J. (2013) 1874. México: Resistencia. Pages 13-14[/caption] The panels above show the detective coming out of the crime scene while members of the media await his words. The detective remains quiet; the police commissioner tells the journalists to wait for the "official communication". This moment is crucial to the narrative/aesthetic strategy of the book, where the awareness of the exposed machinery of the system contrasts with the opacity of the information available. What is it being said in what we see? What does it all mean? The reader needs to become the detective and, blocked from the truth, like a citizen, do her own research for the truth. Who wanted the librarian dead and why? Who can we ask? [caption id="attachment_4232" align="aligncenter" width="501"] Fernández, B. y Muñoz F. J. (2013) 1874. México: Resistencia. Page 10[/caption] The aesthetic 'feel' of the novella is dialogic, as panels and pages and characters talk to each other back and forth. Narrative captions are only used to refer to the protagonist's inner thoughts or to written messages sent through machines. The general melancholy feel of the novella though is achieved not through dialogue, but through the 'silent' wordless panel sequences, which promptly nudge the reader to realize onomatopoeias are not used throughout, and what one would have imagined to be a very noisy world, full of the sound of engines and machinery, is indeed silent, like an expressionist movie (Metropolis?) that has suddenly achieved the magic of colour. [caption id="attachment_4223" align="aligncenter" width="619"] Fernández, B. y Muñoz F. J. (2013) 1874. México: Resistencia. Pages 39-40[/caption] And it is through colour that 1874 inserts itself in a tradition of Mexican visual storytelling that I would dare to trace back to the Mexican muralists. Myers noted Diego Rivera's "increasing preoccupation with industry and the machine", but it is what Myers calls "Siqueiros's tremendous interest in achieving a certain dynamics of movement" that I see inherited in Yorko's parallel mechanized city. Yorko's palette goes for the colours of rust, violence, pollution, concrete and sadness: reds, ocher, greens, browns, the yellow of paper and dim sunlight, the highly-contrasted black of noir. Above all, the trace shows the tension between the softness of the ink and the colour and the hardness of metal, evoking the tensions between the automata and human will. Consider Siqueiros' palette here, the flow of the curvaceous, fluid lines, evoking roots, branches, streams and flames: [caption id="attachment_4233" align="aligncenter" width="500"]
David Alfaro Siqueiros. Section of The March of Humanity, 1965-71
Mural in the Polyforum Cultural Siquieros
Mexico City[/caption] I see a similar drive, an impulse if you will, in Yorko's inclined, bent figures, an angular perspective drawn to the corners of the panel, and, again, the curvaceous, fluid trace of the smoke after the fire: [caption id="attachment_4234" align="aligncenter" width="486"] Fernández, B. y Muñoz F. J. (2013) 1874. México: Resistencia. Page 57[/caption] Or maybe look at the circular motifs in Yorko's robotic characters (more than one robot in the story is a cyclops with a Big-Brotheresque eye) and compare with Siqueiros' attempt at making sense of the texture of technological flesh: [caption id="attachment_4236" align="aligncenter" width="621"] Fernández, B. y Muñoz F. J. (2013) 1874. México: Resistencia. Page 44, panel 1[/caption] [caption id="attachment_4237" align="aligncenter" width="601"] Fernández, B. y Muñoz F. J. (2013) 1874. México: Resistencia. Page 55 panel 2[/caption] [caption id="attachment_4238" align="aligncenter" width="549"] David Alfaro Siqueiros. Man the Master, not the Slave of Technology. 1952. Detail. Pyroxylin on aluminum. Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico City[/caption] Perhaps the reader won't see the echoes I see between the work of the Mexican comic book artist and the work of the great Mexican muralist. Non-Mexican readers expecting to find elements of folklore will be disappointed. The "local" in this comic is not expressed as cliché, but as the places in common between science fiction, speculative fiction and historical political drama. This is a Mexican novella at its core not only because its authors are Mexican, but also because it presents, in genre and highly-aestheticised form, a [perhaps unconscious, or unintentional] commentary on contemporary Mexico. What I read in Bef and Yorko's novella is a meditation on the nature of technology as a means to record history and to remember it. The reader will expect the crime to be solved. Bef and Yorko's fictional city is not Mexico City, but it could be. It floats on the air, pulled by a flying robotic whale covered in rubber skin. Nothing is what it seems, or what we thought it was. The consequences of the war can be felt, but not everyone is willing to see the truth, and those who know it have closed the case. The detectives are lonely, and the librarians are dying. In spite of all the questions posed by the book what remains, for me as a reader, is Mexico: what is it that remains silent, muted in this story? 1874 is also about what is unknown, and therefore it is also about a serious philosophical problem. Asking if androids dream of electric sheep, Bef and Yorko seem to tell us, is a question about hope, whether there can be hope in a world where access to information is blocked and where crimes remain unsolved. What is hope if not the awareness that there was a past and there could be a future? What if we discover all was lost? These questions are of course not new, but the possible suicide of the librarian poses the question of what it means to be human in a world where machines reign. If "electric things have their life too", as Arthur C. Clarke wrote, would they wish to end it when hope is lost? When would an "electric thing" decide to reject life? In automata theory, Wikipedia tells me today, "an automaton is a mathematical object that takes a word as input and decides either to accept it or reject it." What happens when we reject the word that has been given to us? Is this what the librarian did? Is there a metaphor in there somewhere, pristine clear, or am I as paranoid as a robot being chased by all-seeing machines? All this is, of course, merely but the beginning of the question. We'll need a librarian to help us out. REFERENCES "Automata theory", Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automata_theory [Accessed 22 April 2015]. C. Clarke, A. (1968; 1996) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York : Ballantine Books. Fernández, B. (2013) 1874. México: Flash. Fernández, B. y Muñoz F. J. (2013) 1874. México: Resistencia. S. Myers, B. (1956) Mexican painting in our time, available from https://archive.org/details/mexicanpaintingi00inmyer [Accessed 22 April 2015] --- Here's a brief interview with Bef about the prose version of 1874:

#203 Nothing Special: Parallel Universes and Ordinary Worlds in Fumio Obata’s Just So Happens and Etienne Davodeau’s Lulu Anew

wilkinsp — Wed, 29 Apr 2015 17:54:47 +0000

By chance, I happened to come across Fumio Obata’s Just So Happens and Etienne Davodeau’s Lulu Anew (translated from the French) at the same time. Each of these books presents a liminal narrative about passing into a new world or state of being within the parameters of realism. That is, they do what many science fiction and fantasy comics do but in a subtler way. But, be not mistaken, each of these comics is about their female heroine’s radical transformation through exploring another world. These comics are also linked in that the artists are men depicting the struggle of women against their gendered familial constraints that potentially corrupt their freedom and self-determination. Each presents a character making a shift from one world of experience to another and back again that makes the uncanny or unheimlich the dominant experience. In Just So Happens Yumiko must return to Japan from London on the death of her father. There she confronts just how un-Japanese she has become: she is like a foreign guest at her own father's funeral, unable to fathom the customs and traditions. Rather, she sees through those customs and traditions in a way that her family members who have not been away from Japan cannot. At the same time, though, she sees that Japan is her roots. The death of Yumiko’s father is the death of Japan’s hold on her, a release so that she can marry her white, English boyfriend Mark and carry on her life in London. When she goes to Japan, she consciously leaves Mark behind. Yumiko is a successful woman in London where she runs a thriving design company. She is in love with London's multicultural phantasmagoria that presents a contrast to Japanese cultural homogeneity. In the brief segments at the beginning and conclusion of the book in London, Obata overtly draws a diversity of cultural and ethnic types. This is very much a “London” vs Japan book rather than an “England” vs Japan book. When she is on the plane back to Japan, Yumiko reflects on her last visit, particularly on her exchanges with her father. Obata is particularly adept at interspersing flashbacks, dreams, and daydreams into the comic, using visual cues to indicate the relationship between what we are seeing and present reality. As father and daughter watch a fireworks display, we learn that Yumiko’s parents are divorced and don’t talk to each other. Furthermore, her father doesn’t think she can continue in England; he wants her to come back to Japan and get married. He knows someone who might be a good match. Yumiko’s father had old-fashioned gender attitudes. He doesn’t think spending money on a design career for a girl makes sense. To escape this conversation, Yumiko ducks into a Shinto shrine where a rehearsal for a Noh play underway. Noh theatre becomes a metaphor for traditional Japan in Just So Happens. It is both an antidote for and explanation of the empty rituals of her father’s funeral, for instance, as the Noh actors keep invading her imagination during her trip to her father’s funeral. We see these imagined figures integrated with Yumiko's reality in another example of Obata working seamlessly with visual registers. The emotional and aesthetic austerity of Noh contrasts with the emptiness of funeral rituals like the kaimyo that aggravate Yumiko. The kaimyo is a Buddhist holy name for the dead that the family buys from the monk who chants at the funeral: different ranks are available according to how much the family is willing to pay. One of my favourite visuals in Just So Happens is the be-helmeted monk arriving and departing on his motor scooter (page 71?). The playful, childlike image contrasts with the harrumphing holy man in his robes. Like the Noh actor, the Buddhist monk plays a dramatic role that he can step into and out of. Everyone seems to accept this but Yumiko. Later, Yumiko dreams of confronting and striking down the Noh actor who keeps appearing before her. When she does this the theatre collapses around her as if representing the edifice of her Japaneseness. The death of Yumiko’s father turns out to be something of a red herring, or at least only one piece of the puzzle Yumiko needs to figure out before freeing herself into a life in London. After the funeral, she visits her mother, who did not attend the funeral, in Kyoto. A successful academic, she rebels against conventional Japanese gender constraints. Yumiko wonders how well she might have done in a city like New York or London. It dawns on Yumiko that she has been a satellite of her mother’s desire and ambition, as she encouraged her to go to London and gave her financial help. In order to live freely, Yumiko has to liberate herself from that desire and ambition. On the flight back to London, Yumiko has a vision of her father on the mountain side. While Yumiko tells herself that it is important to believe that nothing has changed, passing through customs at Heathrow is clearly the threshold between one life and another. By engaging with and resolving her ties with one home--Japan--she is able to become at home in London. One of the most interesting features of Fumio Obata’s comic is the relationship between the form and content. Fumio Obata is a London-based artist who uses Western comics forms, specifically British comic forms, in this narrative. In other words, this book is not manga; it has none of the earmarks of the Japanese form. Rather, it looks like a serious "European" comic for adults. The colouring is particularly evocative with soft greys and purples. Some of the colours appear textured, as if painted on watercolor paper, while the white spaces in the paper do not. Just as Londonized Yumiko returns to Japan, so does Obata's Europeanized art. Etienne Davodeau's Lulu Anew appeared in French in 2008 and 2010, and was first published in English in April 2015. The narrative frame is a family friend, Xavier, telling what he knows to other family friends about the title character’s adventures when she wanders off from her life after a frustrating job interview. She's been out of work for so long that she is blocked out from the labour force. As we progress through the book, though, we realize that Lulu's frustration extends beyond work. Her husband is a lout prone to drunkenness. As a mother of a sixteen-year-old daughter (who narrates part of the story) and two twin boys who appear to be around ten, she feels the burden of gendered domesticity that has driven her desire for a job. When Lulu emerges from her job interview into the urban landscape, we see something like a version of the suburban United States transferred to France: there are car dealerships and malls with stores called "BebeLand" and restaurants called "Buffalo Grill." It is the landscape of meaningless homogeneity, just the sort of thing one would wander off from. When she wanders off, we are not sure that Lulu will ever return to her family, and the prospect is exhilarating and audacious. Could one just walk away from the structures of the prison of daily life? The narrative framing gives the book a Heart of Darkness or Ancient Mariner effect, so that even when the drawings show Lulu directly, the verbal narrative is distanced and filtered. It puts the reader in the position of being twice removed from the narrative, as the friends who listen to Xavier and Morgane talk know more about the context than we do. I wondered more than once whether Lulu had died, though the narrators and their audience did not seem that mournful. As we progress through the comic, we understand that someone has died--someone mentions a wake--we just don’t know who. Lulu’s journey has three stages based on the people she meets. Each relationship facilitates Lulu’s transition from escaped desperate housewife into something new. A woman she meets in a hotel, Solange, engages her in conversation, gets her to open up about her problems, and offers to drive her to the coast; after initially dismissing the idea, Lulu takes her up on it. Once Solange drops her off, Lulu must fend for herself. Lulu is not alone for long as she meets a man while walking along the beach. Charles is asleep on the beach. He’s like a gift from the sea for Lulu, and Lulu spontaneously decides that they will have a sexual relationship while they walk. Charles helps Lulu detach from her family by throwing away her phone and by introducing her to his two brothers who work and live with him at a campground. Spontaneity, sex, and freedom are the defining elements of this segment of Lulu’s journey. Because Charles has dispensed with her phone, Lulu is freed from the texts and phone calls that to this point have interrupted her in her picaresque. However, Lulu’s old life is always closer than she thinks. When he finds out where Lulu is, Xavier travels to the town with the idea of meeting her and convincing her to come home but once he sees what she is up to becomes entranced and is unwilling to break the spell. He becomes a spy on the romance, which is how he gets to be one of the narrators. Charles' brothers catch him because they too are spying on Charles. Then Morgane brings the twins to the town by train, and before we know it there’s a whole social scene going on in the campground. Lulu and Charles are oblivious to this scene in their romantic bubble. They don’t even know that Lulu’s family and friends have come down to the coast. This lends a kind of stereoscopic vision of Lulu’s old and new worlds. It also reminds us that Lulu’s break for the sea is never a complete one; her new universe is very close to her old one, just in a different dimension. Xavier and Lulu’s children return home to leave her to it. Ultimately, Lulu realizes that being with Charles can only be an interlude; she hitchhikes to another coastal town where she stays with an older woman, Marthe, who takes her in after Lulu snatches her purse and gives it back. As rent, Lulu must tell Marthe what happened to her at the end of each day. Men who wash up on beaches and old ladies who exchange stories for lodging lend Lulu Anew a mythical quality in spite of its realistic appearance. Lulu is a modern female Odysseus. Once the comic changes setting, Morgane takes over the narration: we have now moved into a narrative space occupied almost entirely by women and symbolic transactions among them that is much more complex than what happens in the campground with Charles. When Lulu starts wearing one of Marthe’s sweaters, we begin to see a symbolic identity between them. Marthe represents a possible destiny for Lulu, but also a means of looking back over life to see what is meaningful. When Lulu befriends Virginie, a waiter at a bistro who is abused by her boss, the story crosses three generations. Lulu wants to pay her experience of freedom forward, as Morgane puts it, by talking Virginie into an escape that parallels her own. At first Virginie is up for it, but after a confrontation with her boss, she turns on Lulu and accuses her of trying to ruin her life. The meaning of Virginie’s refusal to find freedom is difficult to parse. We might say that between them, Marthe and Virginie are reflections of Lulu and what has been, will be, and is possible for her. Virginie is also a possible mirror of Morgane, who, in Lulu’s absence has been assuming domestic duties at home. Ultimately, Lulu invites Marthe along when she decides to return to her family, which instigates the final transaction. When he learns that Lulu has returned, Tanguy seeks her out and strikes her, knocking her out cold. He erroneously thinks he has killed Lulu and runs off. Meanwhile Marthe dies in a kind of exchange for Lulu’s new life. The death that has been hovering over the narration throughout has been Marthe’s; while Xavier and Morgane have been telling the story on the outside patio, Marthe has been lying dead on a bed in the house, and Lulu has been out looking for Tanguay. Like the death of Yumiko’s father in Just So Happens, Marthe’s death bestows a kind of permission on Lulu to renegotiate the terms of her contract with life. Both Just So Happens and Lulu Anew explore the possibilities of comics for representing the transformation of ordinary people through a journey that disorients their protagonists from their concept of home so that they can return to reimagine and redefine that concept. Neither book radically reinvents the form. Rather they are both exquisite examples of the mature medium of narrative drawing. Works Cited Davodeau, Etienne. Lulu Anew. Trans. Joe Johnson. New York: NBM, 2015. Obata, Fumio. Just So Happens. New York: Abrams Comic Arts. 2015.

#204 Whatever... Comics, Can(nons, and Deadpool

admin — Mon, 11 May 2015 18:50:53 +0000

This post is understands comics as an integral part of any reflection on the cultural condition in the early 21st century, but…

Because I want to address the above, I’ve been avoiding the writing of this post. It’s massive subject and I haven’t read a lot of comics lately; they’re just too fucking depressing. Superman is a “false god.” Spiderman’s a shit and I don’t know what is happening with Thor or Wonder Woman or She-Hulk or any other big-titted, thigh-gapped figure you wanna name. Daredevil’s on TV (and in California in the comic for fucksakes–hell’s kitchen my ass); the Avengers are all explosions, product tie-ins, and awkward press junkets. Aja and Fraction’s Hawkeye #22 is taking so long Marvel has launched an “All-New Hawkeye” just to keep us occupied. Also, Ryan Reynolds is playing Deadpool in the movie version – read that again, I’ll wait.

And don’t even get me started on the independent scene. I mean, look at the Chris Ware bit above, how depressing is this? If I have to read another narrative focused on the slow, plodding, manic unravelling of a marginalized figure wrestling with the absurdity and secrets of his or her past (which are so often opaque to the point of non-existence, mired in complicated structuralist metaphorical associations). Comics are dominated by stories about an ostracized, depressive, ironic, dispossessed existence. And I blame the adults for making comics into a straightout shit-show right now, especially adults who for some bizarre reason are in love with the 1980s–its video games, Dungeon and Dragons emphasis, and apocalyptic paranoia (land of confusion indeed… A-yay-oh).

But then, there’s Deadpool Killustrated by Cullen Bunn and Matteo Lolli. In the comic, Deadpool kills off classic characters from literature, thus rendering the inter-connected character in the Marvel universe ripped off from the classics dead. It’s a great way to show how influence works: kill Ahab, kill Red Hulk. Sure, the comic’s a few years old now–published in 2013–but it presents an interesting question: what would happen if there were no stories? Well, that’s not quite what it asks, what it really asks is what if there was no characters, no influence, no underlying cultural production to steal, manipulate, recontextualize, and reanimate? What it also illustrates, somewhat haphazardly, is the influence of Western thinking on comics.

Sometimes, we need a reality check: what would happen if Deadpool cut in on Seth’s nostalgic meanderings, or Ware’s lonely, isolated women in buildings, Barry’s frantic self-reflection, Satrapi’s political trauma? Thinking about that pushes forward a few necessary tidbits about comic’s narratives–they tend to prioritize a life of safety, where one can afford leisure, self-reflection, and isolation. I wonder how relevant that kind of narrative is when we live in a world of near total surveillance, within a political infrastructure constantly preparing us for the threat of terrorism–we’re ready for Deadpool if he comes to get us.

One of the issues of comics as a form of “academic” or cultural discourse is that we sometimes forget that they too are ideologically loaded. We are now reaping the “rewards” of narratives that asked us “who watches the watchmen” or featured tired old superheroes coming out of retirement or that seamlessly transferred into another medium, say film, rendering the paper traditions nostalgic. When we started to praise comics for being literary, calling them graphic novels, or memoirs (is there a more pretentious word for comics?), or important cultural commentaries, we opened them up to the ideological scrutiny that informs their making.

It’s time to kill the kanon or, at the very least, acknowledge that all of it–yes, I’m gonna be that definitive–all of it is born out of total privilege and ideological security. The only way any of the comics canon survives scrutiny at this point is if the actual Deadpool comes outta nowhere to take out Ryan Reynolds. Before we start waxing on about how representative comics are of one community or another, we might want to have a look at the corpses that fertilize the soil upon which comics continue to grow. We might also want to look at how the comics we read reflect our privilege and foreground the idea that with that privilege comes a space to seek enlightenment, isolation, historical connections, and ultimately some resolution or synthesis in life. Because that’s bullshit.

#205 On Alpha Flight, Canada, and Indigenous Appropriation

Grayb — Tue, 26 May 2015 18:29:55 +0000

Graphixians, I am writing a conference paper this week, which means that you get to read my uncollected thoughts towards a conference paper. Aren't you lucky ducks, one and all. As the title suggests, I'm thinking a lot about the way mainstream American comics signal "Canadianness" by appropriating indigenous characters as symbolic of north. I came to this by way of Jason Dittmer and Soren Larsen's article "Aboriginality and the Arctic North in Canadian Nationalist Superhero Comics, 1940-2004." It's a really interesting look at the way comics producers in Canada, especially in the Canadian Whites era and with Captain Canuck, used arctic imagery and (deeply problematic) representations of First Nations people in order to code comics and situations as specifically Canadian. I really enjoyed the article and I like Jason Dittmer's work particularly, and build upon it a lot in other contexts. But the article takes a turn that I think lacks some context, and that is to include without critical reflection Alpha Flight in the annals of the nationalist superheroes of Canada. I know where this comes from in the context of Alpha Flight scholarship: Bart Beaty's "The Fighting Civil Servant" article, wherein he makes an argument for Alpha Flight as being more successful at representing Canadian region and more successful as a viable comic book than the aggressively nationalist efforts like Captain Canuck. But Beaty's reading is nuanced in a way that critics who have come after it have failed to note: Alpha Flight is not an expressly nationalist comic book. Its primary goal is not to represent Canada or achieve something meaningful to Canadian identity, but to be entertaining enough to sell well enough in the United States to stay on comic book stands. Alpha Flight is certainly an all-Canadian superhero team created by an expatriate Canadian, but it's not itself a Canadian comic -- as part of Marvel's comic book juggernaut, Alpha Flight always had to serve its corporate master first. (It's worth reading the letter pages in those early Alpha Flight comics to see what I mean. Readers who complained about a lack of geographic or cultural accuracy in the comic were roundly slapped down for misunderstanding that the comic was fiction.) Alpha Flight is definitely part of the tradition of nationalist comics in that John Byrne was certainly influence by Nelvana of the North, and that aspect of Dittmer and Larsen's article holds true. But it's worth thinking about how Alpha Flight uses indigineity to signal Canadianness to an American audience in the form of Snowbird and Shaman whose powers are deeply connected to that land. Indeed, Snowbird loses her power when she leaves Canada, imposing a colonial border upon her and universalizing her indigenous identity as being specifically Canadian (deeply ironic given the current challenges some First Nations have in being recognized as superseding imposed nation-state boundaries). It's an appropriation of First Nations spirituality to represent Shaman and Snowbird in these contexts, and we need to be mindful of the fact that although Alpha Flight's diversity is laudable for its historical context, it's part of a larger history of white comic artists depicting First Nations characters for thematic ends. In the case of Alpha Flight, it's also about defining Canada in terms that are distinct from the US. The foregrounding of Native characters suggests a different kind of relationship to the land, nation, and north than is exhibited by, say, the X-Men, the superhero team Alpha Flight is most commonly either fighting with or against. This question is particularly salient given the 2014 launch of another Canadian superhero – and another appropriation of aboriginal identity – by Marvel’s competitor DC for their Justice Unlimited series by Canadian artist Jeff Lemire (famous in Canada for his Essex County). Again, we see mainstream American representations of Canadian identity coded through the appropriation of First Nations culture, this time in the character of Equinox. Lemire’s attempt is more delicate and nuanced, but still makes assumptions about Canadian identity as inherently indigenous. [caption id="attachment_4314" align="aligncenter" width="600"] It's worth noting that Equinox is a literal appropriation of a real woman, the late Shannen Koostachin of Attawapiskat.[/caption] The task of the paper is two-fold: to unpack Alpha Flight from this assumption about it as a nationalist title, and to trace the use of indigeneity to code Canadian superhero teams and titles as other-than in the context of mainstream American comics. Now I just have to write it.

#206 Mixing our Media: Secret Wars, Age Of Ultron and Contest of Champions

admin — Wed, 03 Jun 2015 05:27:48 +0000

So I have to admit I’ve felt like I’ve been cheating on my favorite storytelling medium a bit. It’s not that I haven’t been reading my monthly comics – I haven’t slowed down at all in this area actually, as I still order roughly fifty titles a month from the big two and a few from other independent publishers. I’ve purchased all the summer blockbusters so far, starting to get into DC’s Convergence (essentially a repeat of Flashpoint with all its various miniseries and “What If” stylized timelines) and Marvel’s Secret Wars which is just hitting shelves as of this writing (also essentially a repeat of Flashpoint with all its various miniseries and “What If” stylized timelines). Both publishers seem to be locked in a circle of revisiting overplayed concepts in the form of ending and rebooting universes as the last and only marketing strategy for a summer event. The fact is, I was beginning to agree with many in admitting that mainstream comics are getting lazy, rehashing past successes in order to try to entice new readers. Given this, like any good addict realizing his fix isn’t quite cutting it anymore, I decided to try a superhero experience I’d been resisting to this point: videogames. Not typical Graphixia fare, but it’s an open week and I found a compelling overlap that I hadn’t been anticipating once the game got its claws into me. I fell into it rather serendipitously - the partner of a colleague of mine happens to be a modeler for a videogame studio, Kabam, which had just completed designing some characters for its new game Marvel’s Contest of Champions, the title (but none of its plot) borrowed from the eponymous 1982 miniseries, ironically just as Secret Wars borrowed its title from a 1984 miniseries. I heard about the game early on, downloaded it dubiously on release day, and I immediately became hooked on the repetitive gameplay, the predictable storyline and the alterations Kabam provided weekly in the form of new characters or tournaments to keep the game interesting for a few more months until, likely, everyone was going to move on. Or, perhaps not. As I’ve been playing the game for months now, I’ve become very familiar with its small plot thread – the characters of the Marvel Universe have been kidnapped and are forced to fight by a “Summoner” (essentially the player) ostensibly for the amusement of masters who are slowly revealed as the storyline progresses. At first this seemed to be simply a device to move the game along, but as the veil was lifted on the rather complicated, continuity-laden and frustratingly grandiose Secret Wars (thanks a lot, Jonathan Hickman), many of the same devices and characters appeared there as well. The concept of a “Battleworld,” where superheroes from alternate dimensions must fight for dominance over one another, appears in both stories. Characters dusted off from 90’s obscurity are also present in both, notably an alternate future version of the Hulk named the Maestro who is, for a time, in charge of the Battleworld - the reference is obscure enough that it's very, very unlikely that his arrival could be seen as a coincidence. It doesn’t take long for anyone “reading” both to realize that while Kabam’s game arrived earlier, they clearly created it knowing that it would act as a sort of companion piece to be played alongside Secret Wars without ever expressly saying so. But the franchise interplay doesn’t end there - Contest of Champions also, just before the release of the Avengers: Age of Ultron movie, adapted its content by adding in Age of Ultron side missions and characters to address interest in the villain inspired by the film. These will likely be phased out and then replaced by whatever new iteration of Marvel storytelling pops up in another medium, whether it be a followup comic book event or the next Avengers / Inhumans / Guardians of the Galaxy film. The fluidity and adaptability of the downloadable, version based videogame as a medium for storytelling has certainly had an impact on the way that many engage with narrative – personally, I’ve had my interest reinvigorated in Secret Wars because of Contest of Champions, knowingly wanting more of the traditional comic book medium because I feel more engaged with it having been an actor for various elements of its plot. The message boards in the game agree, as players shift between discussing the details of the game and the upcoming comics that Marvel and even DC have forthcoming. I have always been an advocate for videogames as a means of engaging with story and even literature (Beowulf on XBox, anyone?) but it is the ability for online gaming to adapt its content to interact with other narratives in other media that is compelling and that, likely, will ultimately allow comics to survive by guiding wayward readers back into the fold – or, hopefully, actually achieving the new readership that both Marvel and DC are desperately seeking. And at 33 million individual downloads and counting, Contest of Champions is impressive if only because it has the ability to act as a nexus for all other media, reaching far beyond the scope of even the best selling comic book. Having just re-read a few issues of the Modernist magazine Transition (now THOSE are fun to collect), I can’t help but be reminded of the way that Joyce would rework his serialized novel, here Work in Progress and what would eventually become Finnegan’s Wake, to bitterly respond directly to criticisms of it within the text itself as he provided more installments. Dickens and Thackeray would do the same, adapting their narratives to the demands of their readers and extending or shortening different plot threads in order to accommodate interest and, in the end, sell more copies of their works. I may have mentioned on the site how serialized comics can do the same, but I failed to recognize the potential here not just across time but across media in being able to accomplish the same goals through an ability to adapt. What’s different, and arguably more compelling, about how it’s possible to do so now is that the downloadable version based game can actually overwrite its original narrative, responding to others by making us forget how we were drawn to it in the first place – Contest of Champions has morphed into an Ultron centred game from its boot screen, adding in alliances and team playing that was never there in its first iteration, though it’s tough to remember it not having these features as no previous edition remains. Regardless of how it ultimately plays out, the experience of working through a narrative simultaneously across multiple media has problematized the way that we engage with story – or at least it should. As a librarian, I am consistently drawn into ominous discussions regarding the death of print and the shift over to purely digital technologies as a means of accessing classics and new texts alike. Exercises like those above demonstrate that this is likely a false binary, tempting in its divisiveness and the ease through which we can contain what is a far more complex undertaking when processing fiction in the years to come, whereby we will be expected to read print, see film and participate as actors concurrently through gaming in order to fully realize a story’s potential. These affordances are just beginning to be discovered, manipulated and tested for their potential – and, as always, comics are leading the way.

#207 Pictures of Parizeau

hattiek — Thu, 11 Jun 2015 09:33:41 +0000

Yesterday the state funeral for Jacques Parizeau took place in Montreal. Parizeau was the leader of the Parti Québécois from 1988 to 1996 and the 26th Premier of Quebec from 1994 to 1996. In today’s Graphixia post I thought I would take an opportunity to look at some of the ways in which Parizeau is depicted in the comics produced in Quebec. Not only does Parizeau appear in a numerous Editorial Cartoons dating from his early days in politics to the present day, but he also turns up in a few longer form comics produced in Quebec following the 1995 referendum. The production of Editorial Cartoons in Montreal, and indeed Canada, has been dominated by the works of two men, Terry Mosher (creating under the pseudonym) Aislin and Serge Chapleau. The way in which these two men, Anglophone and Francophone respectively, have chosen to depict the key figures of Quebec and Canada’s recent history has undoubtedly shaped the way in which the public perceive and conceive of these moments and people. Few people that have lived in Montreal, and even the province over the past forty years will not have a favourite cartoon by one or both of these artists. The ways in which these two men choose to draw Parizeau are rather different. Aislin’s Parizeau is large and overwhelming in his sheer bulk and physicality. Meanwhile Chapleau’s Parizeau is small and generally neatly dressed in a suit and tie, though with somewhat flyaway hair and beseeching eyes. In 1982, when Parizeau held the post of Finance Manager in Rene Levesque’s PQ government Aislin drew and published the below cartoon of the two men. Well sort of, in fact all we are able to see of Levesque are his nose, forehead and a smidgen of hair. Levesque’s small stature and Parizeau’s large build are combined by Aislin in a way that perhaps seeks to hint at the way in which Parizeau’s career will take precedence over Levesque’s in the wake of the 1980 referendum. More than a decade later we see Aislin draw Parizeau as a boxer, the so-called Jack the Ripper: Again it is Parizeau’s bulk that dominates the frame of this comic and this is an idea that Aislin returns to time and time again. In this cartoon we see Parizeau staring intently out at the reader, challenging them, his eyes are wide and seem somewhat scary. Where cartoons drawn by Aislin of Levesque and Trudeau show most if not all of their bodies, when it comes to drawing Parizeau Aislin seems artistically preoccupied with his bulk and less willing to draw his body. In this cartoon from 1994 Aislin draws Parizeau as a deflating balloon, his body no longer comes into the picture, instead he is just a puffed up windbag. While we do see cartoons by Aislin where the whole of Parizeau’s form is drawn, it is striking that he chooses, so often, to focus on just a small part of his body. Parizeau’s sheer size is therefore reinforced and an image is built up of a man whose size intimidates those who oppose him. Meanwhile Chapleau’s Parizeau is strikingly different. Giddy, childlike and charmingly inept we don’t get the impression from either of these men that Parizeau is a particularly subtle politician when it comes to his methods, but the ways in which they go about reinforcing this idea are very different. For example in the above cartoon from 1994 we see Chapleau make reference to Parizeau’s recent victory in the Provincial Elections by drawing him careering downhill on a decrepit bicycle, requiring stablisers, yelling to his audience “Follow me”. Further to this in the following cartoon, published in the same year, we see Parizeau drawn sitting on a see-saw shouting “Yippee” while the cartoon is entitled “Polls go up, Polls go down”. These depictions of Parizeau where he appears almost childlike are reinforced when you see the below image from July 1994: Parizeau is drawn standing on roller blades, scrabbling to gain his balance with a horrified and panicked look on his face. He appears to be at the starting line of what most closely resembles a child’s sports day and as Parizeau scrabbles for his balance the reader notices that he is in fact not even facing the right way for the race, the words “Départ” are written facing the reader and we assume that that is the direction in which Parizeau should be facing in order to begin the race to the elections. Parizeau also appears in Mark Shainblum and Gabriel Morrisette’s 1995 parody Angloman… making the world safe for apostrophes!. Angloman is the superhero alter-ego of Eaton M McGill supposed “Champion of Bilingualism and Multiculturalism. Hero of the oppressed. Insurance Underwriter” and he works from his Fortress of Two Solitudes (Canadian Literature Pun Klaxon) in downtown Montreal. One of the other superheroes in Angloman is the character Capitaine Souche. Not so loosely based on Parizeau humself Shainblum and Morrissette describe Capitaine Souche’s occupation as “Crusader against evil, injustice, and bilingual street signs. Dedicated to souviens until the end of time.” Meanwhile in reference to his ‘normal’ alter ego they write that his career is unknown, “possible retired” (p5). Capitaine Souche is drawn as a large man, round of stomach wearing a costume consisting of a bodysuit layered over a pair of trousers, with a cape and small hat. The trousers and cap are significantly reminiscent of those worn by the Québécois in the past. His cape is fastened by two letter Q broaches, one on each shoulder, drawn in the same way as the Q from the Parti Québécois logo. The chest of his costume bears a logo in the form of a Fleur de Lys divided into two. Capitaine Souche is “possessed the powers of flight, super strength, and the ability to generate hot wind storms by invoking the mystic words ‘By Jove’” (ibid). While they credit him with powers of physical prowess and strength, everything else about this descriptions works to give an impression of Parizeau as being too old for his job and generally somewhat out of place. Parizeau even makes an appearance in the 1995 Comic Book disguised as a Colouring-In Book, Quebec Neverendum by Dave Rosen. There are obviously dozens of cartoonists working in Quebec and Canada who have taken the time to draw Parizeau over the length of his career all of whom have chosen different ways in which to convey his personality and political stance with just a few lines. But the different ways in which these four men chose to depict Parizeau across the length of his career can give some insights into the way in which this man was perceived by the public and how this developed over the years of his long career. It is notable that even when drawing cartoons that were critical of his politics and policies, they managed to ensure that their depictions were full of affection for Parizeau himself.

#208 Whatever Happened to Fiona Smyth?

admin — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 16:51:53 +0000

Nostalgia for the 1990s is all the rage at the moment, and comics are not excluded - Fantagraphics have released Daniel Clowes’ Complete Eightball and Drawn & Quarterly have announced a new Julie Doucet book. D&Q have also just issued a new anthology celebrating the longevity of their alternative comics publishing house - Drawn and Quarterly: Twenty-Five Years of Contemporary Cartooning, Comics, and Graphic Novels. There is a lot to celebrate and the book features an interview with D&Q head honcho Chris Oliveros, as well as strips by the generations of cartoonists they have published over the last 25 years including Doucet, Seth, Chester Brown, Adrian Tomine, Kate Beaton, and Geneviève Castrée. There is also archival material that D&Q has reprinted by Tove Jansson, Yoshihiro Tatsumi and Frank King. The book also features tributes and essays from luminaries such as Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Lethem, and Hilary Chute. It is an impressive collection and might take another 25 years to digest fully. [caption id="attachment_4381" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Drawn & Quarterly #1 (1990) (left) and Drawn and Quarterly - 25 Years (2015) (right)[/caption] In his introductory essay Sean Rogers notes how Oliveros was determined to set up a publishing company that challenged the ‘private boy’s club’ of comics at the time - D&Q sought gender equality in the artists they published, and with their staff. The first issue of the Drawn & Quarterly anthology in 1990 featured twice as many men as woman but it was a start, and the cover featured a striking drawing of a woman creating comics by Anne D. Bernstein. D&Q helped further redress the gender imbalance by putting out Julie Doucet’s Dirty Plotte as their first single author book (as Hattie says “No Doucet, No Dice!”). Today they continue to champion female cartoonists by publishing books by Miriam Katin, Rutu Modan, and Jillian Tamaki among many others. I hadn’t noticed a specific agenda when I began picking up books by D&Q in the early 1990s, I just thought that they were releasing great comics. Although this was also the time that Riot Grrrl and third wave feminism were beginning. Riot Grrrl helped crystallise much of my political thinking, so seeking out books by great female creators was part of that. My reading at the time included Dirty Plotte, Mary Fleener’s Slutburger, and Debbie Drechsler’s Nowhere from D&Q, as well as Roberta Gregory’s Naughty Bits from Fantagraphics, and Nocturnal Emissions by Fiona Smyth published by Vortex Comics. Yes, I was reading Hate, Eightball, Palookaville, etc as well but that's another story. [caption id="attachment_4386" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Nocturnal Emissions #1 by Fiona Smyth (1991) Front cover (left), back cover (right)[/caption] Over the last 25 years the choice in comics reading has grown exponentially, but one person that I’ve missed in comics since the 1990s is Toronto based artist Fiona Smyth. Like Doucet, who studied printing and moved from making comics and zines to creating sculptures, prints and book-art works for gallery shows, Smyth studied painting and printmaking but her comics work was always just one element of her creative practice. According to a 1994 article in the Montreal Mirror Smyth was a painter, video director, musician, AND a comics artist. Smyth’s comics career was seemingly even more brief than Doucet’s. Smyth does get a passing mention as a contributor in the new D&Q book as she featured in the first volume of the Drawn & Quarterly anthologies (issues 5-8) and Fabulous Babes issue 1 from D&Q, however her own solo book Nocturnal Emissions was published by Toronto’s Vortex Comics. There were only four issues of Nocturnal Emissions between 1991 and 1994 (and I seem to be missing number 3, anyone?). In issue 4 Smyth signs off on the letters page, in which readers detailed their dreams, by saying she will print more in the next, bigger issue. Sadly issue 5 never materialised. Issue 4 was the last comic published by Vortex before they went out of business in 1994. Chester Brown’s Yummy Fur, perhaps their biggest comic, had defected to D&Q a couple of years earlier and publisher Bill Marks had become more concerned in pursuing his interests in NASCAR themed comics. [caption id="attachment_4388" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Girltalk #1 (1994) (left), Real Stuff #16 (1993) (right). Covers by Fiona Smyth.[/caption] During the four years that Nocturnal Emissions was being published I sought out any work by Smyth that I could find. And this was before the internet kids, I had to rely on what turned up in the local comic shops in Glasgow. She popped up on the cover of issue 16 of Dennis Eichhorn’s Real Stuff in ‘93 (I was a big fan of Eichhorn’s slice of life work at the time) and she did a fantastic cover for the first issue of Girltalk in ‘94 (a split issue with Real Girl #7). That cover is like a distillation of Smyth’s work at the time - it depicted a blue-faced multi-armed goddess figure with a flaming vagina, wearing platform heels and fiercely exclaiming the title “Girltalk”. Three smaller blue goddesses are shooting out of the first one’s vagina, smiling and introducing the contents of the comic from speech bubbles coming out of their mouths. The colours are deep and rich, reds, purples, blues and oranges. It demands to be picked up and barely needs the “read me” tagline on the bottom. [caption id="attachment_4400" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Page from 'Toad in the Hole' - Nocturnal Emissions #2 by Fiona Smyth[/caption] The covers to Nocturnal Emissions are similarly eye-catching, all purple, green, blue and orange with thick painterly lines, featuring punk girls, religious icons, and strange creatures with penis like appendages on their heads and bodies, looking like the mugwumps in David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch adaptation. The back cover of the first issue features a portrait of a heroine of Smyth's - Frida Kahlo, with blue skin, a vagina-like third eye, and a crown-like flaming vagina floating above her head (another familiar Smyth icon). With all this going on you still notice the eyes, as Jack Ruttan noted “It's the eyes that grab you first. Knowing eyes, foreign eyes, doe-like baby-doll soulful eyes. The eyes of Fiona Smyth's women.” Smyth’s characters are sensual, and the comics are filled with sex, and liminal dream-like hallucinogenic states. [caption id="attachment_4401" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Page from 'Gert' - Nocturnal Emissions #4 by Fiona Smyth[/caption] The insides of the comics are printed in black and white on cheap newsprint but they are no less psychedelic (or as Smyth might prefer “psychadoolic”). Smyth uses pens and brushes to cover every inch of the page in intense scribbles and squiggly lines (and countless erect penises, flaming vaginas, and winged breasts) evoking the trippy feel of taking LSD. The first story is about a stoner called Toad caught in an apparent acid flashback (‘Toad in the Hole’) which turns into a quest in the perpetual limbo of the ‘The Land of Wet Dreams’ - the comic is called Nocturnal Emissions, you knew where it was going, right? The other strip is ‘Gert the Mannequin’ about a woman who leaves the city for a quieter life away from all the sex and drugs that were “gettin her down.” Gert ends up as housekeeper in a Catholic church, settling down and ignoring the advances of the local rednecks. She seems content until Hutch, a groovy rocker with a bulge in his trousers, turns up to divert her attentions back to lust. As Gert spots him Smyth draws her doe eyes twinkling with stars and squiggly lines in an (acid) flashback to her sex-filled previous life. The plots are not groundbreaking but the whole psychadoolic experience and hedonistic enthusiasm carries the reader along. The back-up strips are brief stories of dreams (‘I Dreamt I was Burt Reynolds’), erotic doodles, and real life events - one of Smyth’s art exhibitions predicts the Challenger shuttle disaster. The art is black and white but somehow still seems to be bright and colourful. [caption id="attachment_4384" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Number 2 in The Scottish Greeters series (2105) by Fiona Smyth[/caption] For a long time I thought I wouldn’t be reading any new material from Smyth, like Doucet she seemed to be concentrating on her fine art career. However, the truth is that Fiona Smyth never went away. She has continued to work on her art, illustration, and comics since releasing Nocturnal Emissions way back in the 1990s, as well as teaching at Ontario College of Art and Design. About 10 years ago I picked up a copy of Cheez 100, a collection of her 1-page comics for Exclaim! magazine, and in 2011 she released The Never Weres, a science fiction graphic novel for teenagers, which I have not yet managed to read. The work is still coming, it seems that it was just me that wasn’t paying attention. Works cited: Devlin, Tom (editor). Drawn and Quarterly: Twenty-Five Years of Contemporary Cartooning, Comics, and Graphic Novels. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2015. Eichhorn, Dennis, et al. Real Stuff #16. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books 1993. Smyth, Fiona. Cheez 100. Toronto: Pedlar Press, 2001. Smyth, Fiona. Nocturnal Emissions (4 issues). Toronto: Vortex Comics, 1991-1994. Various. Girltalk #1/Real Girl #7. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books 1994.

#209 Neoliberalism in Boneville

admin — Wed, 24 Jun 2015 00:25:25 +0000

It's midnight as I write this, and I'm in Paris. I was supposed to be home in London by now, but some striking ferry workers started a fire in the channel tunnel, and when I tried to get a flight I was more or less laughed out of Charles de Gaulle airport. C'est la vie. That's relevant because I have, for the last couple of days, been at the joint Sixth International Graphic Novels and Comics Conference/Ninth International Bande Dessinée Conference here. The conference is on all week - I highly recommend you follow the action on the hashtag #IGNCC15 - but I could only take two days off from my day job to attend. Still, I packed a lot in and saw some great papers, and was challenged to extend some of my own research into comics into the content, as well as the context, of the comic I gave a paper on. And as this post isn't part of a particular series, I thought I'd take the opportunity to write a little about my paper and to get my early thoughts down on future developments, as they're fresh in my mind, and as I can't sleep. So this post will be part conference report, part re-hash of my paper, part thoughts on the future of my own research, and part midnight-oil sleep-deprived rambling. So, apologies if you wanted more than a curious assemblage, but this is where I'm at right now.The title of my paper at the conference was "A Singular Creative Vision: Jeff Smith and the production of Bone," and in it I examined Bone's publishing history, Jeff Smith's approach to it as a self-publisher, and his success as a businessman as well as the writer and artist of one of the most successful all-ages graphic novels this side of the millennium. I drew from my own research into Comics and Cultural Work, which is a big part of my thesis and a book I'm working on, and also on neoliberal political economy, both of which presented quite different readings of Bone that I then married together, holding up the 1,300-page trade paperback and yelling at the assembled crowd that it's such a huge book because it needs to encapsulate all these tensions. I think that's how it went down, anyway. If you're not familiar with Comics and Cultural Work, I would advise you to check out the series on it that ran on Comics Forum at the end of 2013. Put simply, the idea with it is to understand comics at all levels, through all producers, moving away from the "narrow auteurist vision of production" that has characterised much of the discourse of comics studies, and to understand comics as cultural work, a term drawn from contemporary sociology. For Bone, this meant giving a major credit to Jeff Smith's wife Vijaya Iyer, who is also the president of his company, Cartoon Books, and who managed much of the business side of Bone in the 1990s and early 2000s. The cultural work reading situates Bone as the product of a collective, collaborative work between husband and wife, the "signs of their cooperation" (Becker, 1) being the phenomenal success of Bone. The neoliberal reading, on the other hand, situates Jeff Smith as a lone genius because of his auteurism, his "singular creative vision" (his own words, from the acknowledgments page of the Bone trade paperback), and his entrepreneurialism, as a cartoonist who put together a business plan to get Bone off the ground and weather the storm of self-publishing through the challenging economic conditions of the 1990s and the difficult market for comics at the time. My paper made an attempt to present both these readings and to draw them together. The neoliberal reading was a greater point of intrigue, as Marc Singer had delivered a paper on Persepolis and the neoliberal self earlier in the day. Paul Williams, who chaired the panel, challenged me to extend the neoliberal reading to Bone's content, and in particular to its three protagonists, the Bone brothers. I thought this was a great challenge and an important question to ask - scholars examining texts in the areas of work and political economy like me often look very closely at context, and less closely at content, when actually there is probably much that the content has to offer to enrich such a reading. In this case, the neoliberal reading, when extended to the three Bone cousins, reveals much about their characters and, by way of reflection, about neoliberal political economy and how it plays out in unseen ways in popular culture. To clarify on the meaning of neoliberalism, just in case: it's a word that refers, at least for my purposes, to the idea that free market capitalism, and the implications that this has for the self, the body and material space, including deregulation and emphasis on the self and individual autonomy, is the only logical and rational way to build a stable society. It's a philosophy that is seen as underpinning much of western government since the mid to late 1970s, taking off fully in the Thatcher-Reagan era. Robert McChesney said it best, in my opinion, calling it "capitalism with the gloves off." In cultural criticism and philosophy, Foucault put forward the idea of the homo oeconomicus in his 1978-9 lectures at the College de France, just before he died, stating that under the growing neoliberal consensus man had been forced to become an economic man, an entrepreneur, in order to survive under western capitalism. So, to wrap up my ramble, here are my off-the-cuff thoughts on the Bone cousins in the context of neoliberalism. Phoney Bone, the scheming, miserly troublemaker, is almost a homo oeconomicus, with his constant, hyperbolic drive for money and his attempts to gain it by any means necessary. His rigging of the Great Cow Race (spoiler alert, if you haven't read it) could even be seen as a reflection of the failure of neoliberalism to temper its worst excesses - I'm thinking here of the rigging of markets in the financial sector, such as the Libor scandal and the excess of bankers' bonuses. If the Great Cow Race is a free market, it should self-regulate, and Phoney Bone should be able to get by within it based purely on the entrepreneurial skill he possesses. But still, he has to rig it, taking his own selfishness - the neoliberal emphasis on self - to its logical conclusion. His schemes never come through for him, though, so neoliberalism is not validated in Phoney Bone, even if he does embody it. Smiley Bone, the grinning, cigar-chomping, positive Bone, represents the invisible power of neoliberalism and the pervasiveness of it portraying itself as rational and logical, and thus making itself invisible. Smiley knows, deep down, that it is wrong to go along with Phoney's schemes, and to dress up as a cow to fix the race (again, spoiler alert). But still he goes along with it, in thrall to Phoney and his aggression, sleepwalking into neoliberalism as western democracy has done. And then there's the main protagonist, Fone Bone. Thankfully, and graciously, he is the antidote to neoliberalism. His whole reason for being is to stop the war, save the valley, to protect Thorn, and ultimately to deliver his cousins back to their home in Boneville. All of which are purposes greater than money, greater than the free market, greater philosophically than anything Phoney can pull out of his neoliberal hat. And though Phoney almost succeeds, ultimately it is Fone Bone and his obscured labour - his cultural work, perhaps - that constitutes the greatest part of the Bone cousins' collaboration on their epic journey. So there's something to chew on: the next time you pick up a successful, award-winning, all-ages graphic novel, you might be reading a reflection of the worst excesses of free market capitalism. But it's more than likely that some hero, like Fone Bone, will altruistically save you from it and take you away - away from neoliberalism, and back to Boneville, wherever your Boneville may be. Works Cited Becker, Howard. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Foucault, Michel. 2010. The Birth of Biopolitics. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. McChesney, Robert (int.) Chomsky, Noam. 1998. Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and the Global Order. New York, NY: Seven Stories Press.

#210 Speed Machines in Early Comic Strips

admin — Thu, 02 Jul 2015 23:11:22 +0000

Comic strips are clear products of modernity, “born” at a time of intense industrialization, urbanization and growing mediatization: they are rooted in a fast-changing urban culture, with its array of new technologies, attractions and spectacles. Thematically, then, comic strips depicted this urban environment from scratch, with panels packed with the new objects of modernity. The variegated connections between modernity, other then-new media, and comic strips have recently been wonderfully charted by comics scholars as Scott Bukatman, Jared Gardner, Thierry Smolderen, and Alain Boillat, opening up a large field of inquiry that remains to be tapped, in a way that challenges the dominant presentist trend in comics studies. This post does not pretend to bring anything new to this discussion, but is just inspired by this kind of approach and rehearses it (or so I hope at least) by focusing on the place of the automobile as an engine of modernity in early comic strips by the three “big” names of the time: Winsor McCay, George Herriman, and Frank King. Portraying the modern urban experience, comic strips often featured new transportation technologies – the subway, the electric trolley, the automobile – and often parodied modernistic futures, imagining how cities would be filled with strange flying objects. It seems only natural that the motorcar, which emerged alongside comics, would prominently feature in them: and so we find strips that very much revolve around the automobile, as in George Herriman’s Prof. Otto and His Auto (1902), Sidney Smith’s Old Doc Yak (1908-1917), Frank King’s Look Out for Motorcycle Mike! (1913) and of course Gasoline Alley (1918-present), the first runs of Harry Herschfield’s Abie the Agent (1914-1940), and we frequently encounter cars in Winsor McCay’s various works, Richard F. Outcault’s Buster Brown, Frederick B. Opper’s Happy Hooligan or Our Antediluvian Ancestors (notably featuring a prehistoric motorcar), and others. Incidentally, many of those cartoonists, King and Smith for instance, were themselves crazed automobilists. In the first two decades of the century, playfully recuperating stories of havoc-wreaking motorcars that populated the pages of the newspaper, the comic supplement displayed an array of strips representing speed machines that hyperbolically smashed everything up along their way, piling shocks upon shocks. In one of his Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend strip, Winsor McCay, under the pen name Silas, portrays the arrival of a countryside fellow to the big city, completely out of pace with its disorientating bustle. Trying to cross over Broadway, he is repeatedly run over by different vehicles that literally tear him into pieces. McCay piles up the same action three times, mapping a range of vehicles. The itemization is not coincidental here, and the poor man moves to being squashed by a horsecar, a carriage, an electric trolley, and by an automobile. The strip does not only represent the variety of vehicles that crowded the city streets, or an evolution of transportation, it also mimics a technological progress where the newest is also the worst, finishing off the character. In a lesser-known strip published two weeks earlier, McCay shifts perspective and focalizes on the driver of the deadly machine. There, the automobilist takes great pleasure in the kind of shocks that will later be inflicted upon the rube character. Side by side with an uneasy and horrified passenger, the driver revels in the destructive technology he is empowered with. In each panel, he tells his friend about what he is going to hit, forecasting the background chaos of the next picture. Here again we find an escalation: the car not only beats its competitors, first the horse carriage then the trolley, it further breaks through a brick building (and an old people’s home at that), and finishes by over running a mass of people (“Hear the bones cracking?”), already alluding to the strip’s next installment. These strips powerfully rely on repetition and itemization to represent the shock-experience of modernity that is embodied in the characters' relation to speed machines. Relying on dark humor, McCay presents a dual relationship with modernism that has been perceptively pinpointed by Katherine Roeder as “maintaining the delicate balance between anxiety and amusement” (2014: 181). George Herriman, in one of his first comic strips, Prof. Otto and His Auto (1902) takes up the new shock of speeding automobiles by developing a character who does just that, repeatedly driving his car Sunday after Sunday (for only about 10 months, though). Herriman’s strip, some years before the appearance of the first mass-produced cars, embraced the pleasure of driving at speed as a thrilling experience (on that subject, see Enda Duffy's fascinating The Speed Handbook (2009)). Of course, Herriman does not entirely leave aside a certain undertone of anxiety: the automobile is portrayed as the same death-dealing technological engine as in McCay’s strips. The driver and his machine are animated by a fantastic glee in crashing and smashing into everything, from other cars to buildings and people. In its ultimate installment on December 28 in 1902, Prof. Otto takes the resolution to “run over nothing but snowmen,” alluding to his long record as dangerous ‘death driver’ well-known to his readers. Following a typical New Year’s joke, Prof Otto ends up crashing into a snow-covered man, thereby breaking his resolution. Here, however, the tone and register are quite different than in McCay's two pages. The strip is somewhat softened (at least there is no horrific grinding of a dog’s body or the likes), the shocks and crashes are much less harrowing, being rather presented as slapstick gags, and the passenger is an enthusiastic follower rather than a terrified witness. This tonal difference is further underpinned by Herriman’s rounded and dynamic style, contrasting with the detailed precision of McCay’s Art Nouveau style. While portrayed as a cataclysmic technology, it is precisely this chaos that suggests its pleasure as Otto persistently comes out undamaged from his countless calamitous rides – signaling a resilient plasticity typical of early comic strip characters, as brilliantly analyzed by Jared Gardner (2012). It is not insignificant that, for one of his first recurring-character strips, Herriman chose to focus on a character that is virtually grafted onto his car. The resilience of his body is interwoven with his position as a driver: no matter what he and his car endure, Otto always comes out undamaged, reappearing every Sunday for another series of shocks and collisions. A strip published on April 20, 1902 illustrates this mild form of cyborg subjectivity. Prof. Otto gives a ride to two impish children, who want the car to go fast. In this race across the countryside, the strip stages a topical confrontation between technology and nature, but in a completely different tone. Prof. Otto, cheered by his two young passengers, is turning upside down a somewhat idyllic and fertile countryside, flashing by helpless and dumbfounded farmers. The running gag is that no matter how recklessly he drives, Otto never succeeds in gratifying the children’s wish, who keep yelling ‘faster,’ then spelt ‘f-a-s-t-e-r,’ possibly suggesting the trill of their voices due to the twitching vehicle (here again, technology affects the human sensorium). In the last panel of the page, Otto lies in a strange position, apparently exhausted by the race: his legs protrude through the bodywork of the motorcar. This is not an instance of bad artistry, I think, but rather a case of two bodies welded together into a 'cyborg subject.' To construct this resilient body, Herriman makes an inventive use of the grid. While most sequential comic strips would depict the movement of the characters from a fixed perspective and against a fixed background, Prof. Otto displays an automobile that keeps eluding the sequential arrangement of panels. Though the comic maintains a fixed–and nearly panoramic–perspective, the car seems to persistently avoid its focal point: it goes so fast that it is rarely positioned at the center of the panel, and it always zooms by at the borders of the frame, leaving behind a dust cloud. What we are shown, then, are the (destructive) effects left behind by the race of Otto and his auto: as McCay, Herriman multiplies the shocks across the page; the strip as a whole displays an explosive variety of different collisions, which the automobilist persistently comes through. The same formal trope and iterative structure would be used a decade later by Frank King who, in Look Out for Motorcycle Mike! (1913), gives it another creative twist by introducing a comic discrepancy between the repetition of crashes and the perception of the motorcyclist. Look Out for Motorcycle Mike! was a short-lived comic strip based on the typical motif of the trip around the world. This was one of the first narrative devices used by cartoonists to introduce some narrative continuity into gag strips, although part of the pleasure involved in its use was that the same gag was held no matter where the character went (Gardner 2013: 242). This combination of loop and narrative is a core feature of Frank King’s strip, in which Motorcycle Mike, touring the world at incredible speed, continually destroys everything on his way, blowing up to pieces the buildings in a frenzy reminiscent of Herriman’s machine in the countryside. The humor of the strip, however, lies not only in the uproarious antics of jolting and bumping vehicles, but also in that the character does not even notice the ruin he is causing. Indeed, the speech balloons make it clear that Motorcycle Mike is simply blind to his destructive trajectory. On April 6, for instance, he razes through Korea, commenting on the ‘flimsy architecture’ he is (unconsciously) knocking down, noticing that “it’s a wonder they wouldn’t building these things right on my road.” The gag is strengthened by the ability of the reader, upon reading the last panel, to look ‘back’ at the other panels, to take in the succession of explosions that pave Mike’s way. The humor, however, is slightly bittersweet and ambivalent: the motorcycle, as a prosthetic device, empowers its rider, but it also makes him blind to the causes of that empowerment. The caveat holds that this ecstatic experience is at a cost with the cultural heritage of the countries visited. In this sense, the strip is an essentially comic satirization of progress, more readily aligned with McCay’s dark Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend. King does not uphold the same melancholic or anxious undertone, portraying with gusto the antics of a motorcyclist. Nevertheless, these three examples, and more specifically the King and Herriman ones, are short-lived, though, and it seems that the car as a fantastical attraction would quickly subside as it became more and more common to drive around. And so, simultaneously with the democratization of the automobile, comic strips would increasingly turn to narrative continuity and family melodrama in which the cars take on a completely different role: this shift seems evident in King's Gasoline Alley, but I feel it is also present in Sidney Smith and Harry Herschfield's works. But that is an assumption and a thread I will need to pick up later. Note Most images are taken from Sunday Press's wonderful “Origins of the Sunday Comics,” on the GoComics platform. The “Look Out for Motorcycle Mike” strips are taken from Kevin Huizenga's blog The Balloonist: these strips are rather hard to find, so if anyone on the look-out finds some, please let me know! Works Cited Duffy, Enda. 2009. The Speed Handbook. Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism. Durham: Duke University Press. Gardner, Jared. 2012. Projections. Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Gardner, Jared. 2013. “A History of the Narrative Comic Strip.” In From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels. Contributions to the Theory and History of the Graphic Narrative. Eds. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter. 241-253. Roeder, Katherine. 2014. Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

#211 Robot Trouble in Alex and Ada

wilkinsp — Wed, 19 Aug 2015 00:18:15 +0000

Alex and Ada,by Sarah Vaughn and Jonathan Luna, follows in a long line of science fiction literature and comics that questions the relations between humans and robots: Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Naoki Urasawa's Pluto, and the Clamp collective's Chobits, for example. Chobits is perhaps the most relevant intertext because of the way it presents the robot as love/sex object, toying with the idea of the ultimate sex toy: a compliant humanoid figure that avoids the messiness and resistance of a relationship with a self-determining being. Therein lies the tension: it seems as if the comic wants to have its robot and eat it too, to have the robot both possess free will and be sexually compliant. In fact, Alex receives a female robot from his grandmother, who has a Tanaka X5 named Daniel as a lover. Alex's grandmother celebrates the uncomplicated sexual pleasures of having a robot partner. She is perfectly satisfied with her X5, so why shouldn't Alex enjoy one too? The facts that Alex has recently broken up with his girlfriend, is 27 years old and has no one else on the relationship horizon answers that question. But Alex is a complicator. He seeks illegal means of unlocking Ada’s sentience, as he sees in his robot the potential for full human existence. But what are the criteria for such an existence? On the face of it, the concern with ‘sentience’ in Alex and Ada shows the anxiety of being unable to distinguish a machine with artificial intelligence from a human being. That is, in its fictional rendering of a struggle for robot rights and free will, the comic presents a fear that human beings are actually robots without those qualities. The clean, smooth art style along with the flat colouring that presents human beings as relatively featureless illustrate this anxiety. Characters look made out of plastic or perhaps rubber: like action figures from the 1970s. For the issue is not organic versus inorganic, but sentient vs insentient. The body initially appears irrelevant in this comic; it is merely the carrier of the mind. Alex and Ada opens with a news story on a quashed robot uprising: in an instance of artificial intelligence gone awry, machines have attacked humans in an apparent eruption of irrationality (or maybe revenge for being oppressed by their human overlords), creating an atmosphere of fear about robots and what they might do. This fear is the flipside of the “what if humans are really robots” anxiety: on the one hand emotionless, mechanical action; on the other irrational outburst. In each case, concepts of intelligence and sentience are figuratively “beyond us.” We don’t trust them inside us, and we don’t know what they will do next. While most of the time they merely seem to allow us to perform dull, rote activities, they present incomprehensible affective moments, like falling in love or being struck by an idea. In any event, robot uprising has parallels with 9/11, and the attacks on robots that follow evoke what has happened to Muslims in western countries. This deflection of otherness onto robots is curious and typical. In Urasawa’s Pluto, for instance, an anti-robot organization dresses just like the KKK. The idea of the robot as stand in for the Other (in terms of race, ethnicity, gender and/or class) fascinates me because it could be construed as either an occlusion/denaturing of otherness or an allegorical way of getting at the subject. In Alex and Ada, the relationship between sentience and the sexualized body can perhaps explain this paradox. Ada looks exactly like a human being, or at least exactly like the other human beings in this comic, apart from a "T" trademark on her wrist. This ‘human’ similarity of appearance in Ada and her capacity for sexual engagement is in fact crucially important to Alex’s desire to “bring her to life.” Although Alex resists the claims of other characters that he is only in it for the sex--"Do you want personality and complete servitude?" (Issue 4. Vol 1)--the fact of the matter is that this comic depends on the sexual tension between the two characters. If it was a Jane Austen novel, Alex and Ada would be called Sex and Sentience. So the de-emphasis on the body turns out to be something of a ruse; really the body signifies sexuality and must be given a mind to match. If the comic wished to avoid a Pygmalion scenario, it would have created a different context. Again, we have a cake/ eat it too situation: this comic is not about sex but...why not! As with other robot comics, some of the robots in Alex and Ada look absolutely human-like, others look like crash test dummies, while still others look like barely anthropomorphised machines for accomplishing tasks. This range allows us to visualize the robots in “evolutionary” terms: just as we can visualize the different variants of pre-historic man leading up to modern humanity. But there is no necessity that artificial intelligence of the highest order be placed in a simulacrum of a human body and not in Alex’s kitchen robot, Otto, for example. Otto speaks, and serves Alex like a butler, but Alex shows no desire to liberate him into whatever sentience might be available to him. Indeed he has no qualms about making Otto serve Ada: Otto is to give her anything she asks for. Perhaps the prospect of non- or less-humanoid robots with sentience is more terrifying than sympathetic, like Hal in Space Odyssey or the awesome Brau 1589 in Pluto. Meanwhile, the human beings in Alex in Ada exist within a web of communications technology via implants in their brain. They can call up holographic screens to watch the news and use their brains to make silent "phone calls" to each other. The question arises whether human beings in such a context are more than nodes in a mechanical network. If so, the focus on the “subject” in this comic is a distraction from that network and the possibility that humans are not even robots, but rather mere parts in a larger, sublime machine. The precise, inorganic looking art, with a lot of ruler work--tons of straight lines and right angles--in addition to the previously noted inhuman appearance of the characters suggests such a scenario. Rather than “robots rights” Alex and Ada is more about the loss of humanity in this machine. Guys like Alex become the “Other” to the machine, while the problems of women, muslims, and other “others” get subsumed and mostly erased in the general problems of “humanity.” This reading would suggest that the robot as “Other” is an occlusion of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. These thoughts are based on the first two collected volumes of Alex and Ada. It’s possible that subsequent developments in the narrative could put the comic on a different track and complicate the so far typical robot story. But if Alex turns out to be a robot himself, I wouldn’t be surprised. Works Cited Vaughn, Sarah and Jonathan Luna, Alex and Ada. Volume 1. Digital Edition. (Berkeley: Image 2014)

#212 Having Sex with Animals: The Inhuman World of Superhero Relationships

admin — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 17:13:32 +0000

What would a sexual liaison between The Thing and She-Hulk be like? Given our theme this round, of human / inhuman, these are the kinds of questions that occur to me. I’m thinking about how sexuality, as it is represented off the pages of North American superhero comics, often problematizes how we might think about sexual activities. While superheroes often find themselves in situations that would lead to–or even require–the consummation of a relationship in a physical way, we rarely think about Supes “doing it” or even how their genitalia might be represented given their superpowers.

First up, let’s talk seriously about how mainstream superhero comics represent sexual activity: they don’t. The only one that comes immediately to mind, and I’m not sure its creator would be happy with it being mainstream, is Watchmen. There are several sexual scenes in Watchmen, all involving one version or another of Silk Spectre (because you can only have one female lineage to have sex with I guess). That said, the scene that illustrates our uncomfortable relationship with sexuality and superheroes is nicely articulated in the image above.

Freaking out over Dr. Manhattan’s self-twosome–the product of his “universal” powers–is pretty much what any of us would do when confronted with the possibility of superhero sex. Let’s think about the dynamics at play here: Dr. Manhattan is a reconstruction of molecules, he can see forward and back, he can be two places at once, he can read minds. So, he knows exactly how Laurie will respond to this, and other advances (which is creepy because he freaks her out anyway). Despite the comic’s concentration on the personal dynamics of their relationship, we can’t help but wonder how the sex would go down. Who or what is Laurie having sex with exactly? And, how good is he at pleasuring her? (He should be unbelievable in bed.) Where does his or her libido come from? (Sorry, awkward pun there… it’s hard to write about sex.) How does Dr. Manhattan experience sexual pleasure? How does Laurie know when he is experiencing sexual pleasure–did Jon reconstruct his inner junk, so to speak?

Speaking of junk (and this is by far my favourite part of writing on this subject), how exactly is the human genitalia of a superhero affected by the substance, situation, context, producing the superpower? Save for fanzines and dark webs, these questions are not answered by mainstream comics. Instead, we get the usual line about being a good family man:

Of course, being a “full-time husband to Mary Jane” means a lot of things, including boinking. Despite apparently leaving Spiderman the superhero behind, one assumes that the superpowers remain. This great write-up on spider sex gives us this fascinating tidbit: “spiders don’t mate by coupling [...] organs. Instead, the male deposits some sperm onto a small web and picks it up on the end of his pedipalps. When the female is in position, the male deposits the sperm in the female’s genital opening.” Alright then. So, how much of the spider’s characteristics transferred into Peter Parker and what kind of kinky play is Mary Jane into? Then there’s this: a spider’s “reproductive organs are at the rear of the abdomen.” So where exactly is Peter Parker’s dick? It puts a whole new spin on how his costume would actually have to look doesn’t it.

[caption id="attachment_4450" align="aligncenter" width="595"] So The Thing has never had sex then? [/caption]

Think about the Fantastic Four’s genitalia for a second. Try to unsee Mr. Fantastic’s snaking member as it stretches, twists, twirls and elongates who knows where and when. Does Reed Richards have spontaneous erections? While the comic concentrates on his superior intelligence, perhaps his moniker belies another source of his fame–both parts of his name (Reed and Richards (“Dicks”)) are penisy. Then, does the Human Torch’s member actually flare up? Because that could be problematic. Both of these thought exercises are tame when we think about how the invisible woman’s genitalia could actually be hidden or invisible–so many lousy metaphors for women’s body parts and here’s yet another one–keep it clean and hidden ladies, please. The men and can flare up and flop it out, but please, ladies, keep yours invisible.

[caption id="attachment_4451" align="aligncenter" width="600"] So many women, so little Thing.[/caption]

Which brings me to The Thing–a better name for this discussion there could not be. What in crap holy hell does his junk look like? Or the Hulk? ("Is that a zucchini poking out of your ripped pants or are you just really really angry? I might make you angry; I like you're when your angry..." [eyebrow raise]). Keep in mind, all these superheroes have sexual relationships. Reed and Sue have a child, so we know they’ve had sex. And we’re not supposed to think about how that all goes down? Superman and Wonder Woman! What’s that like? Then there’s the bestiality: Batman and Catwoman, Hawkman and Hawkgirl, Black Canary and Green Arrow; I don’t even want to know what happens when Wolverine gets an erection.

[caption id="attachment_4452" align="aligncenter" width="710"] Have sex. Send kid away. Have more sex! This is one kinky foursome. [/caption]

I bring all this up because it’s fun and it raises questions about representation. I’m not that interested in how what I’m talking about brings up questions around insecurity with human genitalia, morality discussions, or the way comics “educate” young people about sexual activities and courtship. But just because I’m not interested doesn’t mean these questions aren’t important. Maybe The Thing is a representation of herpes at its worst, as an unjustifiable representation of societal stigma; maybe the Human Torch is the embodiment of the “burning pain” of syphillus. Reed Richards the product of runaway sexual experimentation–“it’s gonna fall off if you keep playing with it!” and Sue, well, she’s what happens when you’re a woman thinking about having sex, or having sex, or being sexual, or being human. There are some real ethical questions raised by how mainstream superhero comics represent the surfaces of sexual relationships, but rarely the actions and never the naked genitalia required to participate equally in an exchanged-based sexual relationship. All Batman wants to do is kiss Catwoman… right.

Thinking about sexual situations through a human reality that collides with the inhuman characteristics of superheroes sometimes reveals the shallow surfaces of our culture. It renders inert the moral curtain that shields the procreative or purely pleasurable act from view. At the same time, it hints at the rich fantasy world underlying the surface fantasies of being a superhero. In an increasingly inhuman world, we have to ask: how the hell would Superman fuck?

#213 Fraggles: The Inhuman Is Better Than Human

Grayb — Fri, 04 Sep 2015 04:12:43 +0000

Because I'm an adult human with adult human tastes, I've recently been rereading the four-issue Fraggle Rock comic arc, "Journey to the Everspring," by Kate Leth and Jake Myler. It's not the only Fraggle comic out there, but it's the most recent reimagining of the characters, and it does something handily in keeping with the theme of this month's Graphixia posts: it largely erases the human characters. If you're unfamiliar with the Fraggle Rock IP (and are you kidding me right now), Fraggles are playful beings that live under the human world; in turn, they share their ecosystem with worker beings called Doozers, a giant blues-singing trash heap, and some questionable ogres. The Fraggles have adventures and learn about philosophy and do all the great things characters in well-made children's television do. It's a Jim Henson property, there's a movie coming out starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and it has serious comics chops having been co-written by Canadian experimental poet and comics/poetry frontiersman bpNichol. I hope you didn't need that explanation. Also, watch this: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMwiIBueWxc[/embed] Anyway, I'm reading the Leth and Myler comic, and I'm interested in a choice they've made. One key aspect of the Fraggles is that they are never really interact with people. Though they live under the workshop of Doc and his dog Sprocket (or the lighthouse of the Captain, if you watched in Britain), humans are part of a world called "Outer Space." Uncle Travelling Matt is exploring this world and sending back his dispatches, but humans are strange -- "silly creatures," Matt calls them -- and don't really register for most of the Fraggles. Indeed, for good reason: Doc is foolish and unobservant, and the Captain is kind of mean. The humans are never present within the world of the Fraggles, but in the television version humans always frame the narrative; Doc and Sprocket open and close each episode, and Matt's adventures with the humans are a key part of the rhythm of every show. The contrast is always made between the "silly creatures" and the mistakes they make through their foolishness and folly and the Fraggles who are always striving to be better stewards of their environment and to fulfill their role in their ecosystem. Time and time again in the series, the message underscored is that the Fraggle way -- to dance your cares away, to let the music play -- is the better, more harmonious way to live. Embrace your inner Fraggle. In the Leth/Myler comic, though, humans are never seen at all. They are the unequivocal villains of the story, the "silly creatures" who have polluted the Everspring, damming the spring with their garbage and filling the water with trash. But we never see them. In earlier comics, like the 2010 digest-style comic, Doc and Sprocket, and Matt's interactions with humans, are interspersed through the Fraggle stories to maintain the through line and contrast. Here, though, the absence of human characters changes them from bumbling oafs to hard-hearted villains; what Leth/Myler lose in not having the contrast between the humans and the non-humans (who do life better) they gain in the ominousness of the never-explained "silly creatures" who haven't just bumbled, but have almost killed off all Fraggles and Doozers with their polluting ways. By keeping the humans off-panel, somewhere where we can't see them or understand their motivations, all that is left is their cruelty. We don't need a visual representation of the contrast between human and inhuman here to see that the inhuman characters are imbued with far more humanity. As the Fraggles and two sets of Doozers work together to repair the damage done by the unseen "silly creatures," the message is reinforced. Two legs bad. Felt legs better.

#214 Coping With Being Human through Inhumanity

admin — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 04:10:27 +0000

Inhumanity in comics was an early staple of the medium, right from Superman in Action #1 asking us to suspend our realities so as to admit a hero who could transgress the physical, mortal boundaries of how one could make the world a better, safer and more rational place through dangerous altruistic acts. Prior to his arrival, readers were used to the pulp heroes of the Phantom, the Shadow, Sherlock Holmes and Doc Savage who, for all intents and purposes, were really only highly skilled people doing their best to fight inequity against difficult odds. Superman was a giant leap outside the box in terms of how we approached heroism, and it’s no surprise that he came along when he did, as a response to the extreme environment of the early 20^th century and the fracture that it represented in terms of people’s worldviews – coming out of a Great War, the excess of the roaring 20’s and the Great Depression, the only figure capable of addressing these previously unimaginable, in reality inhuman conditions was someone inhuman himself. I’ve argued on Graphixia and elsewhere that comics’ heroism, the creation and popularization of particular heroes with particular powers, is always a response to the cultural moment in which it arises. It says a lot about our society, for good or otherwise, that we require that our heroes be greater beings than ourselves, both physically and morally. The rise and predominance of the inhuman or superhuman in comics directly parallels our increasing inability to interpret our world in a reasonable, rational way. As our world gets stranger and less comprehensible, our heroes have to as well, if only purely as a coping mechanism. In doing so, however, comics necessarily presents the inhuman as generally humanoid and mentally digestible, at least enough to relate to on a physiological level (Brenna’s Fraggles notwithstanding). Most of the non-human nature of the inhumanity, even when expressing mutants or aliens, has to be reconciled by our need to identify with those who are there to save us – our heroes can be inhuman, but only to the degree that we can still imagine ourselves becoming them. Similarly, our threats have to be imagined in the same way. One can think of Galactus as an example here, one of comics’ best known villains and an eater of worlds, presented by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as being a larger than life sized alien sent to destroy Earth in the now-classic Fantastic Four 48 (which, on a sidenote, I own – haha), but importantly still drawn as a humanoid in a costume. It’s interesting to note that when the industry rebooted Galactus for film in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and presented him in a truly inhuman way, as a cloud-like creature full of electricity coming to devour the Earth, the concept was a flop and the film overall considered a failure, resulting in some very funny responses as backlash, one of which this attached image is from. Green Lantern saw the same problem in its film (also generally considered a failure) attempting to portray its key antagonist Parallax as an abstract entity rather than a humanoid villain. Comics as a medium, however, rarely gets the formula wrong. From DC’s Anti-Monitor to Marvel’s Chaos and Order, we are presented with even the largest and most inhuman of characters as still being relatable: inhuman yet not, always only just removed from the scope of our experiences. We like our inhumanity then, but only insomuch as we can use it to rationalize our worlds – there’s only a certain extent to which inhumanity is allowed to exist in comics if it’s to be successful. Neil Gaiman does an excellent job of exemplifying this in Sandman, in which abstract concepts such as Dream, Desire and Despair are given human form so that we can cope with, interact with and understand them – anything other than this kind of presentation would ultimately only serve to make the concepts even more obscure and less engaging. Inhumanity in comics serves a twofold and almost paradoxical purpose in pulling us closer to ideas of, say, good and evil, while at the same time pushing them further away by showing us how they’re ultimately beyond anything a mere human is capable of achieving. There are exceptions to these, however, in some characters such as Batman and Hawkeye, but these are by and large the exceptions and are still presented as unattainable ideals; they may actually be human, but even in the way that they are drawn they are normally depicted as being outside the bounds of what it means to be a regular person. We engage with the inhuman heroes and villains in comics in the same way that we engage with all science fiction: allowing ourselves the means through which we can compartmentalize the concerns which are beyond our abilities to understand, all the while creating heroes as well to deal with these problems. And the more challenging our world becomes, the more we need these ideas in order to keep ourselves going. We see this in other areas of popular culture in conspiracy theories that concoct networks of organizations of villains restraining the social classes; in secret government agendas that control our lives; in celebrity idolatry (arguably inhumans in their own right); in unifying, oversimplified concepts like “cancer” that acts as placeholders for a vast array of biological mutations. We have an instinctual desire to ensure that we have our world rationalized, quarantined and manageable, and we cling desperately to the illusion that the most terrifying threats to ourselves and our world are able to be overcome solely through our ability to contain them in the simplifying process of naming them. The advent and prevalence of the inhuman in comics (and really in entertainment media in general) is a direct response to our growing awe and fear in a globally connected and better informed world, and we turn to it for the relief that it provides in collapsing that which is overwhelming spiritually, morally and physically; it’s little wonder that we take such satisfaction in seeing our favorite superheroes die and then consistently come back from the dead in an increasingly atheist world. But if this sounds like a negative portrayal of superheroes, it isn’t meant to be. By hyperbolizing the human and by allowing us access to it by restricting the forms in which it can be portrayed, comics offers an avenue through which we can wrestle with concepts bigger than ourselves. Even if we ultimately can’t reconcile our wonder through our inhuman heroes and villains, they still create the framework by which we can challenge the most terrifyingly, overwhelmingly base aspects of what it means to be human.

#215 Inhumans in the family in The Motherless Oven

admin — Wed, 16 Sep 2015 10:55:28 +0000

In The Motherless Oven (2014) Rob Davis presents a vivid fantasy world where the human and inhuman live side by side. However, he imbues the world with a sense of the everyday in keeping with a long history of British Social Realism. The three teenagers at the heart of the story are all human but their parents are a strange inhuman mix of sculptures, murals, monsters, and mechanical objects. Not only that but they have been constructed by the children themselves. [caption id="attachment_4487" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Panel from p.64 'The Motherless Oven' © Rob Davis 2014.[/caption] The basic plot about three adolescents who run away from school to go on a quest to find one of their dads (who may have been kidnapped) sounds fairly straightforward, but from the very first page it is obvious that we are not in Kansas anymore. An odd circular object with dials and spikes, looking like a steampunk sun sculpture, announces that it is “knife o’clock.” Below it the narration text says “So I chained up my dad in the shed.” The next page shows a dark sky filled with kitchen knives that are plunging to the ground like rain, pouring down on a row of suburban houses. This, it seems, is a perfectly normal turn of events. We are then introduced to the main character Scarper Lee who is watching the “rain” from his window [caption id="attachment_4488" align="aligncenter" width="600"] 'The Motherless Oven' p.7 © Rob Davis 2014.[/caption] Scarper is a moody teenager but he has more reason than most to be temperamental–he knows that he will die in three weeks time. In this universe people know their death day but not when they were born. Davis also introduces an ingenious narrative device; a vase next to Scarper starts voicing his thoughts, we see speech bubbles emanating from its long neck.This is a “home gazette,” given to Scarper by the school nurse to record his thoughts and help him in his dying days like some sort of ceramic therapist. It also helps the reader (and other characters) know what is going on. The only person crazy enough to go out in a knifestorm is the mysterious new girl in school Vera Pike. She turns up at Scarper’s house carrying a cafe table over her shoulder, its thick round top acting as an umbrella protecting her from the deluge of sharp blades. Vera barges into Scarper’s life, sitting next to him in class and waiting at his front gate to walk him to school. She also befriends Curtis Smith in the “Deaf Unit,” the part of the school were kids with “needs” are sent. Curtis has “Medicated Interference Syndrome” which seems to be some sort of autistic spectrum disorder. To help him cope he carries around some sort of retro-futuristic ipod that has a dial to modify his “signal to noise.” If turned up too high his nose starts to bleed and his dialogue turns into a messily drawn stream of consciousness. This newly-formed gang soon escape from school (past the guard lions obviously) to search for Scaper’s dad. We never see Mr Lee in his entirety but he appears to be a large boat on wheels festooned in various brass pipes and horns. He was kept chained in the shed and is wife is a hairdryer. The Motherless Oven has its genesis in an earlier short story How I Built My Father (2009). [caption id="attachment_4493" align="aligncenter" width="600"] 'The Motherless Oven' p.39 © Rob Davis 2014.[/caption] Davis likes playing with words as much as he enjoys drawing the story. Try saying Scarper Lee, Vera Pike and Curtis Smith out loud and feel the syllables tumbling around in your mouth. He also makes much of words with double meanings. When Scarper’s friend Pete’s mum has a breakdown she is emotionally bereft and lying in the school playground but because she is also a machine she has mechanically failed and can’t be fixed. Later Vera tears the legs off another pupil’s mum who is a paper mural pasted up on the school wall. Wondering whether she will die someone replies “I reckon. Mother paper bleeds really bad.” Another interesting aspect to the book is the way that gangs are presented like pop groups and, instead of newspapers, posters on bus shelters give out the news. After a run in with another gang, Orson and the Morons, locals are warned about the exploits of the lead characters with a poster calling them Vera Pike and The Heels “The hottest new band on the estate.” When another band releases something it isn’t a record but someone’s mother into the sky like a balloon. Intriguingly Davis does also depict vinyl records, Scarper has one on his wall and there appears to be a record shop in town. Circles, wheels and spheres are a recurring motif throughout the book. At school one of the lessons is “Circular History” where “God creates Man and Man creates God” and one of Scarper’s textbooks is “The Four Cycles of Life: A Practical Guide to Gods, Immortals, Women and the Sea.” [caption id="attachment_4489" align="aligncenter" width="600"] 'The Motherless Oven' p.105 © Rob Davis 2014.[/caption] Davis has created a complete world with its own natural laws and consistencies. The person who recommended the book to me suggested it was similar to A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess in the way it depicted a distinct world. Even with all the fantastical elements in The Motherless Oven it is still rooted in the everyday world of teenagers–parents, school, music and friendship all being important in different ways. Davis’ earlier work on Nelson (2011) and Don Quixote (2013) was more cartoony and colourful but here the art is subdued with its thick black ink and grey washes. Davis was attempting to keep the story grounded and in an interview he acknowledged the influence of British kitchen sink films of the 1960s “I felt that a black and white world would bind the ordinary and the fantastical together and give it a stark reality.” Films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) by Karel Reisz came out of the documentary movement of the the 1930s and were depicting real working class lives on the screen for the first time. This wave of social-realist dramas would later lead to TV shows like Grange Hill (with its comic book style opening titles) surely another influence on The Motherless Oven along with British comic strips such as The Bash Street Kids in The Beano. Davis discussed his influences in an interview Broken Frontier and they run wider than these. Some such as Ronald Searle’s illustrations and Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture made complete sense–many of the parents look like a piece of Hepworth’s work. Other influences such as Zora Neale Hurston, seem less obvious but no less intriguing and perhaps hint to finding out more about Vera Pike in later volumes. The Motherless Oven is mooted to be the first in a trilogy. It would be fascinating to see how Davis broadens the world he has created. I hope he continues to resist the urge to explain everything in it.

#216 “But why is he an elf?” - Humanity at a distance in James Kochalka's comics

admin — Tue, 22 Sep 2015 08:00:17 +0000

James Kochalka’s American Elf (RIP) is undoubtedly one of the most prominent comic strips in contemporary American Autobiographical Comics, and one which set the tone for many diary strips and webcomics that would follow. Its authenticity is rarely, if ever, doubted by its readership or by critics and scholars. However, there is a slight visual aspect of his comics that might trouble a reading of his comics as authentically and fully autobiographical, which is that he draws himself as an elf, and his friends and family as a variety of animals including birds, frogs and dogs. I’ve never actually known anyone who really reads comics to question why Kochalka draws himself as an elf, but I did once show American Elf to a friend who wasn’t into comics who couldn’t quite understand why Kochalka had drawn himself as an elf, and really wanted to work it out. I wasn’t much use at the time, but it did get me thinking, and when considering the notions of humanity and inhumanity for this post, Kochalka’s little elf-ears were the first thing that popped into my head. So I thought I’d force myself to consider the whys, and the ins and outs, of Kochalka’s choice to steer just slightly away from humanity in depicting his own life. American Elf always approached and presented Kochalka’s life with a sense of play, both in the textual and visual aspects of the narrative, during its 14-year run as a daily diary webcomic. Particularly obviously, his fluid and uncomplex but still skilful visual style, defined by the contours of ink and brush, gives a vivid and simple portrait of his life and its quotidian elements that has a quality of lightness to it, which would not be achieved from the rigid lines of an ink pen. His lines suit the drawing of elves, toads and dogs more than they suit the drawing of human figures, and throughout the reading of American Elf an expectation develops of such playfulness and inhuman, slightly carnivalesque comedy. [caption id="attachment_4507" align="aligncenter" width="360"] American Elf (January 13, 2000)[/caption] Kochalka also attempts philosophy, however, and is not afraid to grapple with big themes, as in the above example, where he moves from bad pizza straight into abject nihilism in four panels. The contrast between the softness of his cartooning and the final words his elf avatar says is, of course, ironic and funny. It would be whether he had the elf ears or not, but the elf ears heighten this irony and humour slightly just by being there - by placing another slight distance between the comic world and the real world, the message becomes all the more prominent and all the more ironic. Elf ears or no elf ears, the comic also remains autobiographical. The slight distance from humanity again just helps to drive the narrative. Much more significant is Kochalka’s own attempts to, in his own words, “learn something about the human condition.” In an interview with Robot 6 about his decision to stop drawing American Elf at the end of 2012, Kochalka answered a question about his approach to autobiographical cartooning thus:

“I don’t think I ever changed events to make the strip better, but I did do selective editing and condensing. Possibly occasional exaggeration? Sometimes people who were actually there would argue with me about how I portrayed certain events. It’s possible that I’m the classic unreliable narrator. I consider the work to be non-fiction, but I would have no particular qualms with it being labeled fiction. Certainly my cat can’t talk, but I’ve drawn the cat talking on more than one occasion. But if the strip is fiction then in some weird way my actual life is fiction. It’s a bit strange!” [italics added by author]

Kochalka’s cat Spandy, who could never be human, became a regular fixture in American Elf and offered many sage thoughts that went largely unheard by the other characters in American Elf. I think this, the imagery of pertinent sounds falling on deaf ears, also says something about the human condition. But it can’t do so without the inhuman cat as its conduit, so once again the inhumanity carries the humanity. [caption id="attachment_4506" align="aligncenter" width="335"] American Elf (August 30, 2005)[/caption] I found just one example of a comic in which Kochalka drew himself as a human whilst re-reading my Kochalka collection for this post (which, incidentally, was so enjoyable that I’m now re-reading American Elf in full from start to finish). Kochalka’s 2005 book The Cute Manifesto collects some of his more philosophical and polemical comics and prose essays, including the infamous “Craft is the Enemy” post that led to this lengthy debate over at The Comics Journal. One of these comics is called “Sunburn,” and it feels flat, serious, forlorn and solemn as it takes the reader through a number of contemplations about his body, which he can “never escape.” In American Elf, however, he does escape his body through his art, and through the interplay between the humanity and inhumanity of drawing himself as a humanoid elf going about his daily life. In contrast to the stern depictions of realistic humanity in “Sunburn,” American Elf feels much lighter, more playful and a more enjoyable and engaging read, precisely because of its slight elements of inhumanity and how they augment the narrative. Looking at Kochalka’s autobiographical comics as a whole, the inhumanity doesn’t really matter that much apart from where it serves the narrative, and it doesn’t affect the classification of Kochalka’s comics as autobiographical. Autobiography is a fluid notion, perhaps more so in comics than any other narrative art form, and might be seen as a continuum or nexus, within which notions of humanity and inhumanity can interact for effect and for the purposes of narrative drive and personal expression, as they do in Kochalka’s comics. The nature of representation in art is such that reality can never be depicted with absolute verisimilitude, nor should it attempt to do so - as Kochalka says in “Reinventing Everything,” also in The Cute Manifesto, “even the most complicated work of art is a vast oversimplification of the actual world in which we live.” So when the question arose of why James Kochalka draws himself as an elf, or why such and such characters in a comic are drawn as animals, my answer was “why not?” and it will remain the same should the question be asked again. The inhumanity present in Kochalka’s comics might not be as overt as some presented in the other posts in this series, but as the above comparison between his comics shows, it makes a big difference, and demonstrates that comics have a unique ability to present a visually enhanced and augmented world for specific narrative effect, however pronounced or unpronounced such enhancements might be. If I may bastardise Ted Leo for a second, a little inhumanity goes a mighty long way.

#217 Inhuman Storytelling? Notes on Vaughn-James's The Cage

admin — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 17:41:37 +0000

Storytelling is often said to be one of the most distinctively human activities. Cognitive interests in narrative often suggest that we basically seek out stories as a pleasure and even a kind of training for the stories we constantly imagine about ourselves and others in our everyday lives. And this view on narrative and the self has largely fed into the contemporary doxa. So far, the previous posts have focused on comics with recognizable characters, but reconfiguring notions of humanity and inhumanity. They challenge their readers by questions notions of the human body and participate in this increasingly relevant “post-human condition,” to use Robert Pepperell's phrase. But what does it feel like to read narratives without humans, not even anthropomorphized animals, robots, monsters, or elves? This is of course a question that all ‘abstract comics’ ask, but instead of looking directly at this kind of works, I'll focus on a comic that does border on abstraction, Martin Vaughn-James's The Cage, and which plays more consciously with the idea of characters, humanity and non-humanity. First printed in Montreal in 1975, The Cage is something of an oddball in the history of comics – kind of one of those 1970s graphic novels. Mostly written and drawn in Paris, the book is deeply influenced by the French Nouveau Roman and related trends in cinema; one of the main influences is Resnais' L'Année dernière à Marienbad, based on a script by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Vaughn-James quickly achieved a cult status in Europe, through the reprints of Les Impressions Nouvelles and Thierry Groensteen's essay La Construction de la cage, but the book had to wait several decades before Coach House finally reprinted it two years ago. There are many brilliant essays about The Cage, so I am not hoping to bring anything new to that exegesis here, but what's interesting about The Cage in the context of this series on in/humanity is precisely that the narrative hones this tension between the absence of actual human figures and the human traces that crop up throughout the book. The most striking aspect of the book is, of course, the complete absence of characters, undermining the key role of the protagonist as a historical mainstay of comics storytelling and its cultural industry. And, as is already known, The Cage does not tell a proper story but engrosses its reader-spectators into a dynamic sequence of morphing images. Visually, the cinematic influence is clear, but the book remains irrevocably grounded in a rigorous double-page composition of two contiguous panels facing each other. It is this rhythmic regularity that provides the ‘beat’ structuring this flow of images (and I am evoking here Groensteen's ideas on the rhythms of comics). In this way, the visual sequence takes on a machine-like, self-engendering dynamic, strengthened by the captions describing precisely this logic and linking it to the workings of a machine. In his 2006 preface, Martin Vaughn-James incidentally describes the making of the book as the search for a “generator” of images to fill in his blank pages, a Frankenstein-inspired machine that somehow becomes estranged from its creator (who describes himself as an “author orphaned by his own creation”). To quote only the most speaking passages:

Blank pages demand to be filled, especially by someone who suffers from chronic horreur du vide. To fill them I needed some kind of generator that could produce atemporal, self-accumulating images that would roll like snowballs and rise like house of cards. I borrowed the facade of an electric pumping station for my ‘image generator’ […] and invented a sort of infernal spinning piano-roll to produce my ‘voice-over’ text.

Even the narrating voice of the text, cannot be led back to a distinct subjective agent that would give the visual sequence a ‘human’ grounding (and indeed, there is a nearly erratic discrepancy between image and text), but emerges from an “infernal spinning piano-roll” – the crazed, repetitive ramblings of another mechanical device. This mechanical unfurling of the book that Vaughn-James describes is further intimately connected to this disappearance of the character, which he pictures as a conscious act of murder:

[…] Fuelled by the basically simple idea of murdering the ‘character’ and of recreating or disposing of the evidence, the engine is cranked up and set in motion. It plunges forward and backward through space and time, consuming its own tail (or tale), spitting out pages and pictures in ever more complex combinations […] (Vaughn-James, 11).

And so, the drawings successively take us across various places: desert landscapes, a Mesoamerican pyramid, several rooms, an electric pumping station, a museum, downtown streets, a cage, and so on. All places devoid of human figures. But if there are no human or anthropomorphized characters (functioning as actants in the narrative), humans are not completely absent from the book. On the contrary, the book is replete with traces, leftovers of human activity. In this sense, it is no wonder that one of the first images of such human presence is an Aztec pyramid. For the rest, there are all sorts of buildings and constructions, clothes, objects, a bed, headphones, goggles, ropes, recording machines, and so on. These objects take shapes that occasionally bring us indeed very close to a human shape – evoking precisely the moment of its murdering. These hints and details function as signposts of the character's disappearance: they are precisely traces, marks that simultaneously indicate presence and absence. And of course, these traces echo the act of drawing and inking: the flying sheets of paper, the black blots, the frames all indicate a mise en abyme of the act of creation (see Claire Latxague's article). As such, they remind us of the humanity behind these pages, of the ‘hand’ that we read in the drawings, the physical marks left by the author. But these ‘human’ drawings are caught up in a logic that exceeds them, that reaches beyond, out of their control, get caught up in their own dynamic: images that have lives of their own. Works Cited Vaughn-James, Martin. The Cage. A Visual-Novel. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2013.

#218 Judge Dredd Versus Raptaur: Ambiguous Inhumanity in Mega City One

admin — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 18:04:56 +0000

[caption id="attachment_4524" align="alignnone" width="317"] Judge Dredd Megazine. 1.11, August 1991. Cover by Dean Ormston[/caption] “Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.” ― Mary W. Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818. Originally serialised in Judge Dredd Megazine 1.11 - 1.17 from August 1991, "Raptaur" (script Alan Grant, Art Dean Ormston, letters Tom Frame) should be considered a classic of British science fiction comics, and an essential story within the Dredd/2000 A.D. corpus. It remains inexplicable to me what the reasons are for the paucity of scholarly research on the extensive body of Dredd comics, particularly by sociologists and political scientists but also by self-defined "comics studies" colleagues. Is there such prejudice against British comics, or science fiction, or comics in general? Specifically, "Raptaur" seems to me to be one of several clear examples of the complex themes and motifs Judge Dredd stories have explored since 1977, ambiguously portraying and commenting on, with varying levels of success, transparency and allegory, everyday life in the United Kingdom. The output by writer Alan Grant is frankly overwhelming and a true feat of discipline, passion and determination, and it remains impossible to attempt any generalised assessment of his work. "Raptaur" is to me an example of his finest craftmanship, perhaps in this case exponentially embelished by the sophistication of Dean Ormston's colourful artwork, characterised in this story by juxtaposing thickly and shakily-bordered rectangular panels over full-page panels depicting cityscapes or hectic, monstruous action. As it's common with many if not almost all Dredd/2000 A.D stories, "Raptaur" very clearly borrows (to put it politely) visual and plot motifs from all over the place. Alien (Scott, 1977), Predator (McTiernan, 1987) and the original Star Wars films predate this story, not to mention of course Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Stevenson's Olalla (1885) and Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) (these last two references would be further explored by Alan Grant in "Raptaur Returns" in 1995). The presence of 'alien' (i.e. extra-terrestrial) life in Mega City One is always taken for granted. The Raptaur is one of those aliens, which in the cover of Judge Dredd Megazine. 1.11, August 1991, containing its first appearance, is decribed as an "alien perp"- a perpetrator, a "creep" in Dredd lingo. The Raptaur looks strikingly like Venom, particularly the eyes and mouth, if not in McFlarlane's 1988 depiction certainly in those by other artists later on. The Raptaur feeds on human brains, and can create a "psi-fog" that disorients its victims. It also secretes a toxin that lowers its preys' resistance. With the Raptaur, inhuman alien predator, Judge Dredd finds his match, and in this story, it seems, Dredd finds his humanity too. [gallery columns="2" link="file" size="medium" ids="4527,4528,4529,4530"]

"Raptaur" is to me a paradigmatic piece of the Dredd corpus because it clearly depicts the political ambiguity of its fictional universe. Judge Dredd is "The Law" in a totalitarian, repressive dystopian megalopolis. He is accountable to almost no one, and the reader is permanently banned from seeing him without his helmet, even when he lies naked on the operating room, because seeing his face would mean confirming he is human. It is the nature of humanity what is in ongoing interrogation in the Dredd stories, because "The Law" substitues human rights, and because, paradoxically, only humans could be so hellbent on a literal application of "The Law". Furthermore Dredd readers are by default in the uncomfortable position to identify with Dredd as the protagonist of its story, its city and its universe. The alien -- that most British and contemporary of fears -- is a mortal threat, and only Dredd and the judges can save us. The Raptaur as the alien is primitive, deprived of verbal language, and a criminal by definition. Deprived of human reason, it feeds on brains, and has psychological ("psi") abilities that defeat the psi judge called for back up. As with many Dredd stories "Raptaur" is narrated also with the counterpoint of a techno-mediatic voice, in this case a radio "on the beat" reporter, that documents the proceedings, offering an alternative yet also clearly institutional, official view which is not Dredd's, but that belongs to the techno-system of surveillance and repression lived in Mega City One. This is the ambiguous identity of Judge Dredd as a character and of the Dredd comics as cultural products. Is Dredd human or inhuman? His humanity is starkly demonstrated in this story, not only by contrasting him with the Raptour as the inhuman alien, but through clever rhetorical devices in dialogue and visual perspective, placing the reader in the place of Dredd and seeing him become human by almost dying and surviving. There is plenty of humour, not just 'black humour', but downright silly humour, which again makes any attempt at placing Dredd on one clear 'side' extremely difficult. Ideologically, this ambiguity can be unsettling, but remains profoundly interesting: is Mega City One an allegory of the modern city, particularly London (but often, also confunsingly, closer aesthetically to New York), and Dredd a symbol of right-wing totalitarian regimes, and the extraterrestrial aliens a way of referring to contemporary anxieties about immigration, where the alien means threat, violence, poverty and crime? If so why is it so easy to identify, at least in this story, with a dying, almost sensitive Judge Dredd, who defeats Death itself to get up and fulfill his mission, even against doctor's orders? It's not either/or, and there are no easy answers. I have been rereading the works of French philosopher Étienne Balibar, and I have been particularly interested in his discussion of the concepts of ´politics of the Other Scene’, 'ambiguous identities' and of 'border' in the European context. In Politics and the Other Scene (2002; translation 2012), Balibar uses the notion of the 'Other Scene' to describe what he sees as the essential heterogeneity of political processes in comparison with Freudian psychic processes (‘other scene' is a Freudian term). For Balibar, ‘the other scene of Politics is also the scene of the other’. I wonder if in a comic like "Raptaur" something like this is at work, in which there is a politically problematic ambiguity in terms of the identities of the city itself (Mega City One), the hero/protagonist and the alien/criminal antagonist. What can we learn from this fictional dystopia and the ambiguous position in which we are placed as readers, being asked to empathise with Judge Dredd? We might have to keep writing, and start thinking harder. References Grant, A. (writer), Ormston, D. (artist), Frame, T. (letters). (1991; 2015). "Raptaur", from Judge Dredd Megazine 1.11- 1.17, republished in Judge Dredd. The Mega Collection: Alien Nations, London: Hachette Patchworks, 2015. Balibar, E. (2012). Politics and the Other Scene. Translated by Christine Jones, James Swenson, and Chris Turner. London: Verso.

#219 Reconciling the Human and the Divine in 'The Wicked and The Divine"

admin — Thu, 15 Oct 2015 21:41:56 +0000

I have spoken here on Graphixia before about how much I am loving Gillen, McKelvie, Wilson and Cowles’ The Wicked and The Divine. Last month’s issue, in which they chose to create an issue exclusively using art that had already appeared elsewhere in the series was a stroke of genius, one that had me overjoyed. In case you’re not familiar with the book, it is the story of what would happen if every ninety years 12 humans were transformed into 12 specific deities, and then two years later they die. Created, curated and controlled by the mysterious figure of Ananke, these young people each deal very differently with the responsibility and expectations of their newfound status and rapidly impending demise. It is this tension between these figures as young people and their newfound powers and positions of responsibility that so interests me. As each issue focuses on a new character and tells us their story, we see how each has sought to reconcile, or indeed ignore, the conflict between their former lives, hopes and dreams and their newly acquired pressing awareness of their own mortality. The twelve gods are all dramatically different, from the cocky Luci, full of bravado, to the sexist horror that is Woden. However, it was really Issue 13 that got me thinking about the aspect of this story that is the relationship between these characters as gods and their former selves as young people. How do they reconcile their rapidly approaching deaths? How do they cope with their new powers? How do they rationalize (or not) the fame, adoration and hatred that as accompanied their new status? Issue 13 told the story of Tara and was a tale of what happened when a shy, fragile young woman was given unprecendented visibility, and how the unwanted attention took its toll on her life. Tara is no longer human, but still plagued by the same issues that she struggled with as a young woman. The abuse that she receives from the public as a popstar is a horrific extension of the catcalling she is subjected to when walking down the street as a young woman. The reader is shown her in conversation with Ananke, pleading with the older woman for some clarity about who she is and what her purpose is. She pleads with the reader “I couldn’t be everything you needed me to be… And you saw what happened any time I tried to be anything else” (p. 20) before entreating them to be “be kinder”. The first arc of the comic, told from the perspective of Laura, a devoted fan of the Pantheon, neatly demonstrated this divide between the human and the inhuman as Laura struggled to reconcile the behavior of the gods with her fandom. Later arcs, as the narrative has focused in on the characters, stories and histories of the gods themselves, have shown how this opposition is found within the characters themselves. The tension between human and inhuman is not only found in the relationship between these deities and their fans but also in the relationship the pantheon have with their former lives. Tara’s plea to the reader to “be kinder… You have no idea what people are going through” weighs heavy on them. This is not simply a story about 12 popstars and their glittering lives but rather a damning indictment on the deification of popular figures and their role within contemporary society. Meanwhile Lucifer (Luci) seemed brash and uncaring, confident and not bothered by the opinions of others. She is harsh and manipulative, using Laura to bolster her own self-esteem and indulge her desire to be the centre of attention at all times. However it is also possible to read her actions as the bravado of a teenage girl, forced to grow up too soon. She is cocky, but she has had to be, when not even an adult herself she has been forced to face the reality of her own rapidly shortened life. This tension isn’t played out in the stories each of the gods (or at least not yet) some of them, like Woden, are committed to their inhumanity. But for others, like Cassandra, the struggle to reconcile their former humanity with their new role, responsibility and platform is constant. I think that it is this struggle that I find so compelling about this series. Being a teenager was terrible, being a teenager with knowledge of your own mortality and the eyes of millions focused on you would be terrible beyond belief. As the series continues I look forward to seeing how this central tension between the human and the divine, the human and the inhuman plays out. Woden might, until now, have been portrayed as a truly despicable character, but was he always like that? Or was it the impact of sudden adoration and attention that turned him into the arrogant misogynist we met in Issue 14? The series has a long way to go and I can’t wait to see how these stories are woven together to reach a climax.

#220 Blue Peter, Sherbet, and the Yorkshire Ripper: Una's Becoming Unbecoming

admin — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 04:14:01 +0000

My view of the 1970s is affected by the fact that I associate them with my childhood. While I was born in the early 1960s, I have no recollection of the Summer of Love or other happenings of that storied period. My time was the aftermath: Elton John, Supertramp, bell bottoms and All in the Family. While I have nostalgic feelings towards the 1970s, I have no doubt we were crueller then. Bullying was a fact of life, as was racism, sexism, and homophobia. And while these things doubtless still exist, they are no longer simply the accepted status quo. There is such a thing as progress in social ethics, even though a shrinking but hardening rump of right wingers yearn for “the good old days” when we didn’t have to worry about being “politically correct.” In any event, I seek out works of art set in the Seventies because I like to see whether their sense of the zeitgeist accords with mine. Most of the time it does; the feeling I get, assuredly the stuff of fantasy, is that in the Seventies shared cultural experience was possible and that those of us who were around then, whether we grew up in New York, London, or Vancouver, can relate to each other in a way that seems impossible now. When I read Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude and kids are playing skully in the street, I feel I have an intimate knowledge of it, though I never played it in my life. The specifics of the game are irrelevant; what matters is the feeling of playing a game in the street. Una’s drawn memoir Becoming Unbecoming should evoke similar feelings, as she reflects on growing up in Leeds in the 1970s. I have more of a connection to Leeds than Brooklyn, as my parents grew up nearby, and I spent several childhood vacations in Methley and Pontefract visiting grandparents and other relatives. But Una made me think of how our experience was not shared and never could be because of her growing up as a girl subject to the double standards of attitudes towards girls’ and women’s sexuality. Una links her own lived experience to the search for the Yorkshire Ripper. David Peace's novels in his Red Riding trilogy make the violence and misogyny of the Yorkshire Ripper simply an extension of the violence and misogyny in the male-dominated world of Yorkshire in the 1970s. The police, newspaper men, prostitutes, and people in general live in a world of Clockwork Orange style ultraviolence. Page after page of it leave the reader battered and numb to the experience. Una makes the same kind of connection in her graphic memoir: the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, with its misdirections and false assumptions on the part of the police, provides the context for Una's own subjection to sexual assault. But where Peace hits you over the head, Una draws you in with bemused understatement and subtly symbolic drawings. As the title itself suggests, Becoming Unbecoming is both a reflection on transformation and being and an analysis of how a person, the author herself, comes to defy a parochial sense of morality and aesthetics. What interests me most about Becoming Unbecoming is Una’s use of the comics medium to explore the past and reflect on its meaning. There's definitely a sense of two strong communication channels interweaving in Becoming Unbecoming: language and images work together in precise ways. The art is evocative and expressive, while the writing has a reflective, inquiring quality that gives the ideas clarity and gravity; it is simple but not simplistic. One of the arguments for the graphic memoir being a genre of trauma is that images can compensate for what is fundamentally unsayable. But that’s definitely not the case here. Una has no difficulty writing what happened to her: her voice is a powerful element here. Any given page offers language and images working together in elegant counterpoint. For example: The television report on the search for the Ripper infiltrates the cozy world of the living room and spills over onto the second half of the page. No one is in the living room watching or listening to the report, making it seem as if Una expects the reader to sit down in one of the chairs. Also linking the two halves of the page, stitching them together, is the needle and thread in the middle, which does double duty as a metaphor for the impossibility of finding the Ripper through a 5 pound note he gave one of his victims. The deadpan tone of “meanwhile I was getting interested in boys” juxtaposed with the brutality of the television report, creates a disturbing effect, as does the fact that so many of the children in the drawing are staring out at us. Even though the image shows some violence, with one boy appearing to strike another, the teenagers on the schoolground in their uniforms seem innocent in contrast to the description of the stabbed prostitute; they look as if they expect some sort of explanation. This gaze contrasts curiously with the empty living room: at the beginning of the page we are looking in--as if peering into a doll house--while at the end, we are being looked at. The perspectival shifts are clever and implicate the reader in the scene. Thus a single page of Becoming Unbecoming connects and disrupts the worlds of everyday life, social interaction, and media sensationalism. What the Ripper is up to is far away and yet he could strike close to home at any time: the play between distance and proximity echoes the perspectival shifts. Una’s own position is conveyed by her presenting her adult self’s attempt to interpret her child self’s knowledge about sex. For example, she says that she did not know what a prostitute was, and that she was curious about them. While the Una of now understands what a prostitute is, she maintains the child’s sense of bafflement about the incomprehensibly contradictory meanings of the word “slut,” its relationship to prostitution, and its relationship to Una’s own sexuality. Here the words travel around the page in search of answers; they go up and down hills and around roads. The words themselves “negotiate the landscape” that Una has trouble negotiating with adults in language. What follows is a verbal and visual deconstruction of the word “slut.” The word refers to prostitutes who are paid for sex, women who are enthusiastic about sex, lesbians and so on. The term applies to any woman in any sexual context, or even just any woman. Indeed, as we follow the words along the road the images of the women, the one leaning against the streetlamp and the one smoking, are perhaps suggestive of prostitutes, but also they could very well be any women, making us ask what the signs of prostitution or sluttishness are. Does leaning against a streetlamp signal prostitute? Smoking? Length of dress? The only way for a woman not to be confused with a slut is to be completely non-sexual. Finally, the word ends up saying more about its speaker and their attitude towards women than about the person named by the word. The visual correspondence between the woman in centre of the page, smoking, wearing a short dress, showing cleavage and Una at the bottom of the page creates the central connection in the book between the word “slut” and the narrator. While a disembodied face proclaims “I am not a slut!” behind Una’s head, Una knows the word has been applied to her in spite of her being a victim: The connection to the Yorkshire Ripper here is that the police’s understanding that Peter Sutcliffe’s victims were “only” prostitutes, in spite of that not being the case, led to them making incorrect assumptions and mistakes. Una suggests that such assumptions and mistakes afflict all women as the line she draws between herself and the victims of the Ripper demonstrates. In a single page, Una sums up what the 1970s as a whole were like: At first we have the impulse to look at the decade through rose coloured glasses, but reflection shows us a time of great social upheaval and threats to a peaceful existence. But in the middle of the page, Una talks about her own lack of concern for world events at the time as she was wrapped up in simple pleasures: Blue Peter and sherbet. This, we think, is the way that things should be. But as we read on in the book, we see the centre of that page destroyed by the men who take advantage of Una when she is a child. Instead of simple pleasure at the centre of the page, we see a picture of the Yorkshire Ripper, who, as Una tells us, was not some spectacular monster, but an ordinary man of his time. Work Cited Una. Becoming Unbecoming. Brighton: Myriad Editions, 2015.

#221 The Comics Code Revisions of 1971, Will Eisner, and The Beginning of Now

admin — Tue, 03 Nov 2015 18:02:17 +0000

The title above is a bit misleading since I’m looking here to make a claim about cultural shifts that act as impetus for aesthetic movements. While it’s always a risky move to associate cultural shifts with aesthetic turns (sorry, a lot of turning and shifting metaphors, but stay with me), comics in the 1970s respond to socio-economics in a way that seems to entrench them as a representative aesthetic medium. At the same time, and as a result of similar reactive moves, the 1970s represent a watershed moment for freedom of expression in comics outside the nature of its aesthetic practice. That is, at the same time that comics are responding to the depressing socio-economic conditions of the 1970s, they are also establishing new currents for distribution. The result is the establishment of a comics cannon that, rather than represent an ironic and heavily sexualized reactive underground (Crumb, Pekar) or the Superman Condition (that anyone can be great as long as they have superpowers), tends to lean more heavily on comics as a metaphor for disenfranchised cultural representation.

The disenfranchisement metaphor also extends to the establishment of broader networks for distribution, figuratively disenfranchising Marvel and DC monopolies in favour of a more open distribution method. Bottom line: the Comics Code revision of 1971 might serve as a metaphor for the shifting cultural hegemonies both inside and outside comics production that marks the beginning of a more literary turn in comics production and aesthetic representation.

The 1970s represent a moment where the medium gets organized in a way that is independent from the two major distribution houses of DC and Marvel. A reformed code born out of shifting cultural ideals of the 1960s, a do-it-yourself ethos also taken from the 1960s independent comics scene couple with attention to more canonical forms of storytelling and a deeper understanding of established tropes in comics production, suggests that the 1970s, rather than the countercultural production of the 1960s or the utopian idealism Golden Age of the 1950s, may have been the beachhead moment for comics as a valuable aesthetic medium capable of deep cultural commentary.

Will Eisner’s Contract with God appears in 1978 and, though debatable, represents the beginning of comics as a “literary” medium. The quotes around literary are there because the stress here is on how comics turn in on there own aesthetic sensibilities rather than how they ape literary stories or narratives. When we reimagine New York in the 1970s for instance, it’s a long way from bring the model for Batman’s Gotham or Superman’s Metropolis; it is a city on the brink of bankruptcy. For from being a hub for cultural and economic elites, New York is destitute. Its remaining aesthetic pioneers are those that challenge the prevailing cultural currents by hanging out at Studio 54, Warhol’s Factory, and frequenting Times Square’s pornographic features such as Deep Throat and Debbie Does Dallas. One of the interesting ways to think about this is that the 1970s has no over-arching socio-cultural narrative–no civil rights movements, economic prosperity, no fight against political collusion, no sexual liberation, equal rights, only seemingly perpetual racial crisis, economic crisis, political crisis, sexual crisis, moral crisis. What artists like Eisner provide is precisely a narrative about American life that rather than representing a press away from traditional modes of storytelling returns to the well-worn, stable, social contract and moral foundations of aesthetic practice. At the same time, the book asks legitimate questions around the nature of contracts (social, sexual, moral, religious, economic) between the ideal and the real that have, by the 1970s, been shattered for most.

Of course, thinking about how Contract with God functions as a metaphor for the disenfranchisement of the 1970s is where the connection to socio-cultural conditions reaches its apex. In the backwash of 1960s idealism and the riptide of the energy crisis Eisner’s narratives stand as models for these disenfranchised populations. The tropes are uncommon for comics at the time but representative of the time: socio-economic frustration and disillusionment; domestic violence; racial, religious, and ethnic questions. Where comics before may have offered an escape from the drudgeries of everyday life, Eisner’s representation of the socio-economic climate of 1970s is all too soaked in the depression of East Coast America.

Another facet of Contract with God is that it breaks through into the bookstore. Rather than appearing solely in the comic book store, Eisner’s work problematizes the straight-line distribution model that the medium itself precipitates. No longer “just a comic,” the medium has extended its catalogue reference--exploded the limitations of being labelled as a single genre. There’s some work to be done around Eisner’s work being published by Baron Books, the house that also published Great Illustrated Classics, but not here. The natural extension of this publication displacement is the direct marketing of Dave Sim, whose self-publishing ethos further extends the domain into which comics might extend. Briefly, comics are clearly responding to the changing socio-economic traditions both in terms of storylines (or aesthetic representation) and distribution methodologies.

This brief and entangled missive cannot do justice to the multifarious currents that meet in 1970s comics production. That noted, its worth really thinking about how the 1970s is under-represented in discourses about comics history. Often focused on Eisner’s work, or that of Dave Sim, our critical attention on the decade seems to attend to it as a bridge between what comes before (Golden Era and rise of Independent Comics) and after (1980s revival, 1990s super-hero re-entrenchment).

Perhaps what’s important about the 1970s isn’t the comics themselves, but the way the 1970s marked the end of the power contained in the traditional Comics Code–and its “seal of approval”; the end of the straight-line distribution model dominated by DC and Marvel; the end of comics as a single medium or genre. All of which is replaced with artistic and aesthetic integrity–or at least the sense of it; the birth of direct marketing and other different distribution models, the sprawl of comics as a medium, out of one genre category into many–hence the “debates” around what to call it (Graphic Novel, sequential art, comic, shit, etc.). Given these principles, the 1970s clearly encourage the birth of a then nascent medium that will eventually yield more complex culturally-relevant storylines (Maus), challenge the central principles of comics design (Watchmen), force a re-contextualization of comics’ own canonical histories (Batman: Dark Knight Returns), and a de-industrialized comics production (Cerebus). It would seem that out of the hangover of the 1970s emerges the foundational mechanics for comics as we understand them today.

Note: If you’re interested, you can review the code and the changes here.

#222 The Simulacral 70s: Tripping With the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers

smarsden — Wed, 11 Nov 2015 05:25:57 +0000

Writing about the 70s in comics is a little problematic as we get further and further away from the decade – two of the four central graphixians (myself included) weren’t even born yet, and for me it’s always had a distant feel despite all of the products that I would see growing up that promoted 70s culture and lifestyle. I find it difficult to be nostalgic for an era I never knew, though I do get to feel this vicariously in a way. The comics that I inherited from my father were from the sixties and then, around when he stopped collecting, from the 70s. He made the tragic mistake of giving them to me as a toddler, and I have the tattered, literally chewed up remains of the earliest issues of Justice League, Green Lantern, Classics Illustrated and the like to show for it. My father began collecting again with me when I was a boy and then a young man to participate in what had become my hobby, but I got the feeling from him that comics in his day were an altogether different experience. I’ve retrieved and shown him some of his early comics and quoted the hundreds of dollars that they would now be worth if they had been kept in good condition (first appearance of Doom Patrol, first Jonah Hex, etc) which are now in shambles – though they were tattered long before my tiny hands got ahold of them. Instead of the expected regret I’ve been met with happy stories of how they had been rolled up and put into his and others’ pockets and taken to camp, how they would be read and reread and reread until nearly every panel was memorized. In comparison, my world of collecting comics was bagging and boarding, reading once – maybe twice – then treating them like the investments that I knew they were. The result of the difference in reading habits means that I now have tens of thousands of comics in pristine condition and organized carefully in alphabetical order in complete runs. My father’s comics, which now occupy a small box beside my larger collection in my basement, are mostly coverless and in pieces, but have clearly been well loved, over time and by many. I sometimes question which collection really has more value. The comics that did survive my small, probing, tearing teeth and fingers were those from the 70s that I wasn’t allowed to see as a young boy – now inherited, these still remain in the side collection despite being in far better shape, purchased when my father was older, exploring more mature content and definitely never taking them to camp. My favorite of these, and likely the brightest exemplar of the simulacrum that I’ve built up in my mind to represent the 70s, is The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. The title first appeared serialized in underground newspapers, was collected by Rip Off Press and published as bound comics (my copies), later reprinted by Kitchen Sink and others down the line, remaining in print today. The series continues to have a cult following, having been adapted into 3D animation and even pornographic films over the years – it’s a counterculture comic that has as its core drug use, depravity and satire, knocking down equally social inequity and its own readership for living wildly and on the fringes of society. The brainchild of Gilbert Shelton, the series exemplifies the spirit of the era in looking at the predecessors of the hippies – the freaks who lived irresponsibly and with abandon, less fashionable than the hippies who would follow and typically aligned with recklessness, nudism, and a paranoia against the oppressive nature of society of the variety that can only come from rampant hard drug use of all varieties. Following the exploits of three drug-addled friends and their cat, the collected comics are a series of one to six (give or take) page Archie-style vignettes that most often aren’t particularly funny or insightful, though they are quite frequently politically charged with a passionate distaste for normalcy and acquiescence to authority. Drawn in the same detailed crosshatch style as Robert Crumb whose Zap comix came out the same year as the Freak Brothers’ debut, the cartooning has something of a filthy look, almost as if there is too much detail where none should be. Filled with sex and drug gags, racism, homophobia and sometimes misogyny, it’s difficult at first glance to see why Freak Brothers gained ground and retained its popularity over the years. On closer inspection though, it’s the unfiltered nature of the underground comic that carries the most weight and has the most impact because it’s self-consciously mired in its cultural moment in a way that other comics are not. Highlighted throughout are complaints about commodities prices, maligning particular government policies, questioning the legal system and the casual racism that were all a part of the era. I think to my own superhero-centric collection from the 70s that I hoarded backwards over the years with Claremont, Ditko, Buscema and Adams among countless others, and none of them have the clout that a single issue of Freak Brothers has. It’s not because they’re offensive, though they are, but because they are the era, unapologetically, and regardless of how real the version of the 70s it presents is, for someone like myself who never lived through the decade, it feels visceral and palpable in a way I can’t achieve elsewhere. Freak Brothers comics make me curious about the culture of the 70s and, because of how they found their way into my hands, make my wonder about my father’s participation in it if this was what he was reading at the time. Zines and underground comics (or comix, or however you’d like to refer to them) weren’t and aren’t beholden to the standard value judgments that attend participation in the larger marketplace. Comics already struggle on the farthest margins of literature, and books like Freak Brothers are doubly removed from legitimacy. They’re not predicated typically on aspirations of commercial success because that’s not what their purpose ever was. They don’t have to adhere to a morality or theme or even a consistency that would be attractive to typical advertisers – as such, I’ve found they tend to be more honest and more compelling, and even in their often grotesque caricatures it seems that I’m drawn into a world that my X-Men and Batman comics from the period don’t let me get at. Despite them not holding the same monetary value as the other of my father’s comics that I destroyed, I’m particularly glad that these are what survived. And I think it’s telling that I haven’t collected them beyond what my father passed down to me, since really, I collect otherwise everything else I can get my hands on – looking at my collecting habits objectively, I think that there would be something inauthentic about searching online or elsewhere for the rest of them, like they’d find their way into the wrong collection if I were to acquire a full run to bag and board. For the time being and likely for good, they’ll stay off to the side, and maybe even, eventually, find their way again into a backpack or a pocket perhaps when my own son is old enough for me to pass them along to.

#223 Graphixia, #CityLIS, and the Alt-Academic

Grayb — Wed, 18 Nov 2015 00:18:07 +0000

I don't want to write about the 1970s. I think everything that happened before I was born is basically pointless. Kidding. Not really. Luckily, I have a whole other much better thing to tell you about instead. Last week, Peter and I were in London to talk about creating on-line scholarly communities for alt-academic voices. In other words, we were talking about Graphixia. And the audience was so amazing that we have a huge bank of tweets to tell the story of our chat -- so I went ahead and Storified them! What follows is a compendium of the best tweets from our one-night only engagement in London, England. Thanks, City University London, for being an exceptional host! https://storify.com/brennacgray/online-spaces-and-the-alt-academic

#224 Hey Frankie, Do You Remember Me?

admin — Fri, 27 Nov 2015 11:36:24 +0000

For ten days in November there were numerous events throughout the UK as part of Being Human: A Festival of the Humanities. In Dundee we celebrated the time Mary Shelley spent in the city as a young woman, and how her experiences here, including watching the whaling ships at the docks, would go on to influence her most famous book Frankenstein. There were talks, walks, readings, and music but one of the biggest events was the production and launch of Frankenstein Begins, or Mary Shelley’s Dundee, a comic depicting Shelley’s sojourn in the city. Produced in-house at Dundee Comics Creative Space (my new place of work!), the comic was created by writer Chris Murray and artist Norrie Millar, with design and lettering duties handled by Phillip Vaughan. At the launch Dundee Dramatic Society and students from Dundee College turned the comic into a short play. [caption id="attachment_4621" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Frankenstein Begins by Chris Murray, Norrie Millar and Phillip Vaughan[/caption] What has all this got to do with the 1970s? I hear the hordes of Graphixia readers shout. Well, I’m getting to that. Also at the launch was Graphixia contributor David Robertson of Fred Egg Comics, who was performing a DeeCAP presentation of his new strip Frankensteins. David talked about the different versions of Frankenstein (or more specifically the creature) that he had experienced during his life - from Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee in the movies, The Munsters and Groovie Goolies on TV, and on to Mike Ploog’s adaptation in comics. Another comic strip that he touched on was Frankie Stein which appeared in several British comics published by Odhams and IPC in the ‘60s and ‘70s. I was born in 1970 and so this is where I come in. Like David, I was fascinated by the many incarnations of Frankenstein’s monster. Pretty much every version in popular culture was derived from Boris Karloff’s iconic version from the Universal monster films of the ‘30s. David also noted that discovering that Frankenstein was the name of the creator and not the creature was a childhood rite of passage. The Universal movies were undergoing one of their periodic revivals in the 1970s, no doubt in part due to the success of the Hammer horror films featuring different versions of the copyright free characters. Toys and magazines featuring the monsters had been flourishing since the early 1960s and I was excited to be able to read Frankie Stein every week, as well as in the occasional annuals and Summer Special editions. [caption id="attachment_4623" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Frankie Stein's first appearance in Wham! issue 4 11th July 1964[/caption] Frankie Stein was created in 1964 by Ken Reid, who was even then well on his way to becoming a superstar artist in UK comics. He had left school aged 14 and gone straight to art school, and was apparently expelled a week before graduation for hanging out in a café instead of going to class. He then set himself up as a freelance artist and eventually contributed comics to the Manchester Evening News. In the 1950s he was contacted by DC Thomson (DCT) to work on The Beano and became the first artist to draw Rodger the Dodger in 1953. From 1958 to 1963 he also drew Jonah in The Beano. This strip featured some of Reid’s finest artwork. Jonah was a gormless sailor who would cause the sinking of every ship he sailed in. This was usually accidental and often Jonah appeared to not notice the destruction that he caused. The strip was written by Walter Fearne and was a perfect showcase for Reid’s fevered imagination. Fearne would regularly supply a script that he considered would need only a dozen panels. Reid would then supply the page of art with up to 36 panels, “the way Fearne described a particular incident often set me off on a train of thought that had me creating additional scenes. I admit that sometimes I simply got carried away with things.” Reid getting carried away was hugely popular with the readers, and Jonah became the most popular strip in The Beano. At last year’s Comics Unmasked exhibition at the British Library there was a 2-page strip of Jonah original art on display, which was worth the admission price on its own. The size and detail of the page was jaw-droppingly impressive. Dense with ‘chicken fat,’ even small elements such as a cheeky Scottish carp character responsible for misleading the Loch Ness Monster, were done with a huge amount of attention to detail and humour, a sensibility that permeated all of Reid’s work. [caption id="attachment_4618" align="aligncenter" width="599"] Jonah - art by Ken Reid, written by Walter Fearne © DC Thomson[/caption] In the 1960s DCT rivals Odhams offered him a massive increase in his page rate and the opportunity to write his own stories as well as draw them. Reid didn’t want to leave DCT but the chance was too good to pass up. He could now indulge in his passion for slapstick horror comics and Frankie Stein was brought to life. Another of Reid’s strips in this genre was also hugely popular; Faceache first appeared in Jet in 1971 and featured Ricky Rubberneck a young boy who could “scrunge” his face (and later his whole body) into various monstrous shapes. Reid died in 1987 having been named Best Writer and Best Artist by the Society of Strip Illustrators in 1978. [caption id="attachment_4625" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Front cover of Frankie Stein annual (1977) and front cover of The Adventures of Ticking Boy (2011)[/caption] Recently I was conducting some research on my own practice as an artist and comic book maker for a presentation and I came across the cover to the Frankie Stein annual from 1977 with its unusual depiction of Frankie as a superhero. Although not drawn by Reid, it prompted a massive Proustian involuntary memory, a bit like reading David Robertson’s strip. I had this book as a child and I spent hours poring over it and drawing my own versions. I can see the influence permeating my own work especially on the cover to The Adventures of Ticking Boy with its debt to superhero comics, although inside several of my stories have a more Promethean theme akin to the usual Frankie Stein strips. It seems like any comic reading kid from the 1970s has a little bit of Ken Reid in their comics DNA.